I’ve been playing around with MailMate rules, trying to figure out how to take advantage of having rules available on every folder including smart folders.
I had rules in Apple Mail that used subject line or sender criteria to send the email to my “action required” folder, e.g., bank statements, insurance bills, etc. would be automatically filed. Now I could either have the rule mark the email as read and then filed, or I could file without marking it as read. In the first instance, I would never see the email until I checked the action required folder, even though I may have wanted to see the email and act on it sooner rather than later. If I allowed it to be filed and marked unread, a badge appeared that made me want to click on that folder like it’s another inbox. I could not figure out a system that appealed to me.
With MailMate, I set up a smart folder so when I read a message on any of my devices, the email is tagged action required, forwarded to OmniFu and filed within 5 minutes (the refresh interval I set in MailMate). This makes me aware of the task, but for the 99% of the time when I don’t want to process the email immediately, it goes into my system without any further effort.
Here’s how it works. I set up a smart folder with the inbox as the source. Conditions are
- All of the following
- Message is Read (not possible with Apple Mail, as far as I know)
- Any of the following:
* Condition for bank statement
* Condition for insurance company
* Condition for credit card statement
* etc.
The rules applied are:
- tag as actionrequired (in case I ever want to use tagging)
- forward to OmniFu secret inbox
- move to action required folder
I leave MailMate running all day (which is a good idea anyway since it integrates with SpamSieve) to get the desired behavior.
I could have used the OmniFu Add with Summary command in MailMate, but that required a keystroke in OmniFu to move past the dialog box.
On to the next MailMate feature…
