I’ve got this Mail rule:
When I receive mail from a number of wineries, it is supposed to resend (I’m using Redirect but have also tried it with Forward) it to my wife, then flag it and move to my Wine mailbox.
What it does is flag the message and move it to the Wine mailbox. It doesn’t appear to even attempt to send the message. To make matters more confusing, when I save the rule by pressing OK the actions get sorted, putting Move Message first. So something really hokey is going on. I’ve tried deleting the rule and reentering it to no avail.
So is anyone here using a rule to redirect/forward messages successfully? If so could you post what the rule looks like. Perhaps I just need a different approach. A web search brought up nothing useful – people reporting issues with this never seemed to get it resolved. Hopefully there is a Power User that has gotten this automation feature to work.
OK, after a lot of fussing around I discovered the bug in that “Redirect Message” or “Forward Message” only work as an action if there are no other actions. So it works if I use two rules:
followed by:
Curiously, Apple’s example of use has only one action.
It’s interesting that yours is working. I have only asked Mail to forward a message based on conditions and it doesn’t work at all. I’m trying the server-based rules on the icloud.com site now to see if this helps.
Thanks for chiming in, @tomalmy. I’m sorry but I’m not sure I understand the workaround you are referring to. My rule only has one action (Forward Message) but doesn’t seem to work. Can you suggest any changes?
Found a workaround. I was trying to auto-forward newsletters to Readwise Reader, but the issue persisted for me to this day, regardless of whether I tried to forward the message or redirect it. Not sure what’s happening with the Apple Mail rules, but from Google searches, seems this is an ongoing issue for some.
What I found works for me is to use a rule to identify the message, then “Run AppleScript” (which can be customised to run as many actions on the message as needed, of course). The following script works (forwards the email matched by the rule to the specified address, then moves the message to a custom folder). The script was written with the help of GPT-4 in TypingMind (Setapp).
using terms from application "Mail"
on perform mail action with messages theMessages for rule theRule
tell application "Mail"
-- specify the mailbox in the account
set myFolder to mailbox "MyCustomFolder" of account "MyCustomAccount"
repeat with aMessage in theMessages
set newMessage to forward aMessage
tell newMessage
make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {address:"MyCustomAddress@library.readwise.io"}
send
end tell
-- move the original message to "MyCustomFolder"
move aMessage to myFolder
end repeat
end tell
end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from
Thanks, this works great (I used ChatGPT to customize the code for my situation). I do have one question, do you know if this wil also forward automatically if I am offline and my Mac is turned off? Or does it only work when I am online?
Thanks for this! I was super frustrated that I couldn’t get a forward to work with a mail rule, and every other post I found about it had no answers. I did have one glitch where it forwarded a different message but it worked as expected for my other 2 tests.
I made an account to say thank you.
I also added ‘without opening window’. This makes sure it does this in the background so you don’t get an annoying mail pop-up!
set newMessage to forward aMessage without opening window
Looking at all the different solutions and non-solutions I wonder if the results vary because of different mail server types (Outlook, Gmail, POP, IMAP). The initial solution I found still works 6 years later, but I still use an ancient POP server. YMMV, apparently.
Its best not to do this in your Mail client application (Mail.ap, Outlook, Thunderbird etc) since these rules will not work when your computer is a sleep or turned off.
Better practice is to setup these rules on the mail server usually via the website where you can access your email.
Apple iCloud mail is very limited, Google Gmail has one of the most powerful options.
POP is ancient but like morse code has a purpose.
If you set it to download your mail and delete is from the server you are leaving a minimal digital footprint Its also faster if you are dealing with poor internet connectivity a specially if you have the option to configure it not to send attachments by default…
I use POP because I only read email from one computer and I want to keep all my email local. I suspect that most people want to at least read (and send) email from their phone and their computer, but that’s not me! I also have iCloud and Google email accounts, but these are not my main addresses and are only used for throw-away mail.
Thanks anyways 
Its also faster if you are dealing with poor internet connectivity a specially if you have the option to configure it not to send attachments by default…