Smart mailbox & inbox

I've set up a Smart Mailbox such that all mails that agree to a certain condition go into that mailbox. This works, but the mails also appear in my Inbox. How can I make sure they only go to the Smart Mailbox?

Smart mailboxes do not store emails themselves as they are essentially just "saved searches". In other words, when you click on a smart mailbox, it just displays all messages from other mailboxes which match certain criteria.
You want to instead be using just regular mailboxes. Delete the smart mailbox, create a "mailbox" instead, and set up a rule to move all emails matching your criteria into that mailbox.

Similar Messages

Will deleting the inbox anf inbox.msf files within the smart mailboxs folder delete any emails in my unified folders?

I have three accounts set up in Thunderbird, two are unified and the third one isn't. I've looked through the setting in the tools-account settings for each of the three accounts but I cannot see anything that refers to unified folders. I have the view-folders button set to on.
I've seen a solution on your forums which reads:-
Help menu (Alt +H) > troubleshooting information Click the show folder button.
Close Thunderbird
open the mail folder open the smart mailboxes folder
Delete the inbox and inbox.msf files
Restart Thunderbird.
I don't understand why this solution should make all my inbox's unified, and I don't want to loose any emails.
Can anybody help please?
Response appreciated.

Bonjour Crumbleey,
Excuse me, I don't understand your problem ... Can you describe it and tell me what you want to get ?
I have been using Thunderbirds for years now, I installed it in many PCs, I solved many problems using only the standard possibilities of Thunderbird, I never had any need to intervene in the emails files and folders.
If you want to delete an account which has its own set of folders, if you want to keep its emails, first move the emails in Local folders.
Pierre

Inbox to smart mailboxes

I have set up my smart mailboxes and they are working but the e-mail still will show up in my inbox. If I delete it out of my inbox it will also delete it in my smart mailbox. How do I keep my mail in my smart mailboxes but have it deleted from my inbox so its not full of every e-mail.
Thanks

smart mailboxes is really for filtering and then if you would like, processing email after the filtering, for either replies/delete/move to another mailbox/archiving... so in order to achieve what you want, you would need to manually move the emails you filtered in a smart mailbox to another mailbox or delete, them, then they will be moved from your inbox.
hope this helps

How can I make my mail MOVE from inbox to a smart mailbox???

Hi, I do business on my computer and I set up some smart mailboxes for some mail I get daily. However, the mail that goes into these smart mailboxes, doesn't seem to move there, now I have two copies of that mail. I want these files to MOVE OUT OF MY INBOX into these smart mailboxes, HOW do I do that? Or is that not the purpose of the smart mailboxes?
Anyone have an answer?
thanks

Smart mailboxes are not separate folders that can store files, they are indexes to files that are stored elsewhere. The same mail item can appear in a dozen smart boxes, if it matches the criteria, but only in one normal mailboxes.
Make some normal mailboxes and set up rules to sort your incoming mail to them.
AK

Gmail and other IMAP, smart mailbox for inboxes

Hello,
I have Mavericks, use Mail.app, including 4 active email accounts. I have a smart mailbox that includes any message from 3 of the 4 account inboxes, and I've been using this setup since Snow Leopard. After upgrading to Mavericks, this smart mailbox no longer works properly.
So 2 of the 3 mailboxes included in the smart mailbox are gmail, the third is non-gmail IMAP. The smart mailbox does include the correct messages from all three inboxes together, but it lists the gmail boxes as being from archive (AKA All Mail) instead of Inbox. Apparently Mail.app is doing a message matching between those emails, and preferring the "all mail" version over the inbox version. This didn't seem to be more than an annoyance at first, until I discovered that I can't archive emails from the smart mailbox: I have to go directly to the inbox to archive them, because calling "archive" on an "all mail" message is a No-op.
I beleive this problem is not specific to smart mailboxes, because it happens on search results as well. So
Select gmail inbox
search for a sender in that mailbox only
select some of those messages
click "archive"
The effect is that the messages will disappaer from the current search result, but as soon as I dismiss the search I can see the messages are still in the inbox.
Clearly the enhanced gmail integration was done hastily here.
I don't know if there is a workaround here. Apple must fix!

Oh, and there was one other issue I forgot to mention. When I used this arrangement before Mavericks, the smart mailbox pointing at my inboxes would "live update", so if new mail was received in an inbox and I was looking at the smart mailbox, it would update immediately. This functionality is no longer there.

Mac Mail - Can I make emails in smart mailboxes not show in my inbox?

Hi,
I am running several mail accounts on mac mail. I just set up a bunch of smart mailboxes which are working but the emails in those smart mailboxes are still showing up in my inbox? I thought the purpose if mailboxes (smart or not) was to reduce your inbox volume?
Does Lion or any other 3rd party mail apps do this? Thanks.
OK sorry forum and Apple bandwidth and Storage..ha I didn't look hard enough at the forum...found my answer which is to create regular mailbox and set up a rule.
Message was edited by: davidgisme

Smart Mailboxes do not remove mail from where they are stored. They only serve to help you to organize and find spefific criteria quickly. They don't perform actions.
If you want to move messages, you could try creating mail rules to perform actions, such as moving messages. You will have to look to see if rules support the criteria you're looking for. Mail/ Account Preferences/ Rules

How do I get blind copies of new emails I send to appear in my inbox instead of my smart mailbox?

How do I get blind copies of new emails I send to appear in my inbox instead of my smart mailbox?

How do I get blind copies of new emails I send to appear in my inbox instead of my smart mailbox?

Using smart mailboxes to sort out inbox

Hi all-
Is it possible to sort out all the mail into smart mailboxes so that they don't appear in the inbox? Currently, I have smart mailboxes set up but those messages that have been sorted into the smart mailboxes still appear in the inbox.
Thanks

no that is not possible. smart mailboxes are used to filter/find mail based on a rule/criteria, and then if one chooses process them to other normal mailboxes or delete after having sent/read... so the nature of an email that gets filtered to a smart mailbox is to show up in that smart mailbox and in whatever mailbox they show up in other than that smart mailbox - also based on the rule you set of course. for you to have these emails not show up in inbox you would then have to create a normal mailbox and move them there, or delete them.
hope this helps

How can I get a view of what's not in any smart mailbox?

I want to see basically my inbox, only with all of the things being displayed in my smart mailboxes HIDDEN. I don't see an option for this. I tried creating a smart inbox, but there's no way to create the inverse of my smart mailboxes because the rules don't seem to allow it. Is there any way to do this or am I out of luck?
Thanks,
Jon

Thanks. Yeah, smart mailboxes being sort of filtered views of your INBOX makes good sense (references not copies as you say).
I could do what I want to do if there was either an option to hide stuff in the inbox that's in a smart mailbox OR if there were better smart mailbox rules for what to include. For example, if there was a "None" choice as well as "Any" and "All", I could create an Inbox2 that contains all the stuff that doesn't match any of the criteria for my other smart mailboxes. But it's not quite the smart. Also, I could make it work if you could include smart mailboxes in the rules themselves, but they only work with regular mailboxes. I can understand why that would not be a feature though.
Basically, smart mailboxes are great. BUT I want to use them to reduce the clutter of my inbox, not just see a view of it. So perhaps this is a feature request. I can't see how to do what I want to do...

Mail: smart mailbox contents disappears/search doesn't work & fix is only temporary

Since installing Mavericks (including the Mail update), the contents of my Smart Mailboxes disappears (the Mailboxes themselves are listed, there's just no content) and my ability to get results from Search within Mail disappears.
I have done a lot of searching here and via Google and read other people with similar problems. I have done the usual magical stuff: resetting permissions (including the version that involves the command "resetpassword"), deleting caches, etc. - but to no avail.
Spotlight clearly knows about all this mail, because I can find it with HoudahSpot, which uses the same database, but somehow Mail is not able to read what Spotlight knows.
Now there is a commonly recommended fix, which is to go to Terminal and type some version of:
mdimport ~/Library/Mail/V2
This works (as does reindexing the entire disk)! But only for about a half-hour to an hour, at which point Mail reverts to its previous state. Running the command again works again, but once again the cure goes away shortly after. Once again, the Smart Mailboxes are empty and search in Mail stops giving reslts.
Can anyone suggest a real, permanent solution to this problem, besides switching to another email program?

Okay, I think I understand better now. So I just ran a test, by creating the following rule:
I specifically chose an address (obviously not the one shown) that I had a message from in my Inbox, and a word that was present in the subject line of several messages in my Inbox. When I ran this rule on my Inbox, it copied exactly the messages I would have expected into the test mailbox. Are you seeing different behavior with the same rule, or is your rule constructed differently?
If the difficulty is with running the rule, note that (as I said earlier) rules only run automatically on unread incoming messages. It won't run automatically on existing messages or on messages on an IMAP mail server that you have read on another device using (in which case they will have been marked as read). If you need to run this in such conditions, you'll have to either run the rule manually or run it via an AppleScript or something similar that is somehow (via something other than Mail) made to execute at certain times/intervals or under certain conditions.
And you're correct, a smart mailbox would be totally inappropriate for what you're trying to do! It would behave exactly as you guessed.

Lost Mail in Smart Mailbox

I tried to edit a Smart Mailbox and lost all my mail in the smart mailbox when I hit the "-" to remove a double entry. The original entry remained and I added another entry and also I reentered the one I had removed. However, nothing now appears in that Smart Mailbox although there are message in the Inbox that meet the criteria.
Is there any way to recover my lost mail in the Smart Mailbox and how do I get the messages into it that are in Inbox?
Thanks.

You didn't lose the mail by doing this, you understand. A Smart Mailbox is like Smart Folder in Finder. It just shows you all mail that matches a set of requirements.
At this point you just need to think it through and re-enter the Smart Mailbox requirements (being careful about the "that match ALL" and "that match ANY").
Fred

Is there a way to create a Smart Mailbox that shows Sent emails only?

Hi there,
I am trying to find a way to create a smart mailbox that only shows emails I have sent.
If I receive 20 emails today, 10 yesterday say, I have a Smart MB where I have set up emails received today, another SMB for emails received yesterday and another SMB for emails I've received in the past week. I can very easily see what has come in during the last few days or whatever.
What I also have are rules that move all emails received and sent to specific folders. The idea is that I will have nothing in my INBOX. The problem is that although it's easy to set up views to see what emails I've received on any day using the calendar option, I can't see a way of doing this to see what emails I've sent.
So, if I receive 20 emails today and I replied to 3 of them, those 3 will get sent to whatever folder I've allocated for them - I put all emails TO/FROM in one folder for each email address. This way I don't have 2 email folders TO and SENT for each recipient.
My problem is that I want to ONLY look at what I've sent today or maybe yesterday etc. if I can set things up the same way as receiving emails, But I can't seem to do this.
Seems strange that there are options to see filter out what's coming in but not what is being sent! But if there's a way to do this, it would be appreciated.
Regards,
Maz

Mail creates a Sent mail folder automatically when you set up an account. All your sent mails are kept there. You configure how it saves your sent mail here:
You should see the mailbox in Mail's sidebar:

Can I sync Mailboxes? Or do they need to be Smart Mailboxes?

Hi all,
Awhile back (sometime during OSX 10.3 or so), I set up several different mailboxes in Mail to help me organize my emails. For example, I have one mailbox dedicated to receipts that have been emailed to me, which I keep indefinitely for tax purposes. Another mailbox is for a certain email discussion list I belong to, in which I keep certain emails with information I'd like to keep on hand.
Now, fast forward to today. I use both my G4 iMac and my Intel iMac to check for mail. And, of course, my inboxes are perfectly synchronized. However, not so with my mailboxes. For example, if, on my G4, I drag an emailed receipt from my inbox to my "receipts" mailbox, the email doesn't show up at all when I open up Mail on my Intel iMac, since it's no longer in my Inbox. So, there's no way to access the receipt from that computer. I have to boot up my G4 iMac to access that particular email.
Is there a way to sync my mailboxes up? Or do I need to periodically archive my mailboxes on one computer and restore those archives on my other computer to do a type of "manual sync" between the two computers?
Or, should I just change them all over to Smart Mailboxes? Smart Mailboxes will sync up automatically won't they? And I can drag emails from my inbox to a smart mailbox, right?
Thanks for your help!
Kevin

The answer should actually be in your Mail's built in Help system.
Assuming you're using a MobileMe email account it's very easy to keep your folders in sync as long as you use IMAP. I may be wrong but it sounds like the mailboxes you're trying to sync are in fact stored on your Mac and not in the server. in the list of mailboxes in Mail do you see the mailboxes listed under "MY MOBILEME" or "ON MY MAC"?
Smart mailboxes are just mailboxes that automatically gather together emails that match the criteria specified by you.
In Apple Mail Help search for "mailboxes" for lots of info about mailboxes, including syncing. Also search for "IMAP" if you don't know what that is.
If you're using another email service other than MobileMe then you can still do the automatic syncing of mailboxes if IMAP is supported. Gmail for example supports it.

Mail: ANY doesn't work in smart mailboxes or rules?

I want to create a smart mailbox that will copy and archive all messages to/from a particular recipient and e-mails to/from others about the subject of most of the conversation with that recipient. I want the archiving to happen as they arrive in my inboxes and not automatically remove them from the servers--some I still need on the servers to access from multiple locations/machines.
But I can't even get to the archiving issue: the smart mailbox that says 'contains ANY message' meeting these rules:
contains recipient1
contains subject2
always has fewer messages than one that simply 'contains recipient1' so the ANY condition, that in boolean terms should be an OR combination, appears to functionally act as an AND.
When I tried to create a smart mailbox folder to contain two mailboxes, one for contains name1 and one for contains subject2, each of which separately works fine, clicking the smart mailbox folder containing both leaves the window empty, so I can't see the messages name1 and subject2 interlaced in the date sent order or any other. I just get one group or the other by clicking the submailboxes.
And trying to bypass the problem using rules doesn't work either--the 'any' command is as dysfunctional there as it is in the smart mailbox dialog. I can manually search for the relevant terms (recipient1 and subject2) and option+drag them to a mailbox for archiving, but this results in many duplications, especially if repeated over time, not a happy result.
Some searching here and googling suggests that the ANY command is problematic in this OS for a lot of people, but is there a known fix? Or a better way to create a 'smart' archive to do what I want?

Okay, I think I understand better now. So I just ran a test, by creating the following rule:
I specifically chose an address (obviously not the one shown) that I had a message from in my Inbox, and a word that was present in the subject line of several messages in my Inbox. When I ran this rule on my Inbox, it copied exactly the messages I would have expected into the test mailbox. Are you seeing different behavior with the same rule, or is your rule constructed differently?
If the difficulty is with running the rule, note that (as I said earlier) rules only run automatically on unread incoming messages. It won't run automatically on existing messages or on messages on an IMAP mail server that you have read on another device using (in which case they will have been marked as read). If you need to run this in such conditions, you'll have to either run the rule manually or run it via an AppleScript or something similar that is somehow (via something other than Mail) made to execute at certain times/intervals or under certain conditions.
And you're correct, a smart mailbox would be totally inappropriate for what you're trying to do! It would behave exactly as you guessed.

Can't get smart mailboxes to work with "message has flag = color"

I'm trying to set up a Smart Mailbox that will find all the messages to which I've assigned a green flag. This should be easy, right?
Unfortunately, this isn't working -- I definitely have messages with green flags in my inbox, but they're not being collected into the smart mailbox.
I've also tried this:
but it doesn't work either.
Is this broken in Mavericks? Am I doing something wrong?

Re Eric: Arggh -- the first image (which went into the comment form but didn't show up) was of the "create smart mailbox" dropdown, which tested "match all rules: message has flag = green". The second image tested "match all rules: message is flagged & message has flag = green".
Re William: I'd like to have one smart mailbox for green flags and another for purple flags. The colors here were just meant to be examples.

Smart mailbox & inbox

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