Create a Priority Inbox in Mail (only show unread + flagged emails)
I have come up with a system of managing my emails in Mail (OS X only) that has helped me tremendously in managing the dozens of emails I receive each day. Before this system, I used to mark emails as unread that I needed to take action on. This became very unwieldy as I would lose track of what I had read vs what I just needed to take action on at a later point. I had many emails fall through the cracks, and urgent emails didn't get regarded as promptly as they should have.
To solve this problem, I spent time experimenting with Mail's Smart Mailboxes. I wanted a Smart Mailbox that showed me only unread + flagged messages. This would allow me to read a message, and if I needed to regard it at a later point, I could just flag it (Cmd + Shift + L) and know that my mailbox would force me to see it until I unflagged the message. If you are familiar with Gmail's new Priority Inbox functionality, this is system is essentially that (minus the algorithms that Gmail has that removes irrelevant emails from your Priority Inbox - eg, I get emails from a Cron system every night that Priority Inbox would exclude).
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="887" caption="Here is a screenshot of what my Smart Mailbox looks like"]
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Mail's Smart Mailbox functionality forced me to create three different Smart Mailboxes to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, with two of them feeding my "CLS" Smart Mailbox which is my equivalent of Gmail's Priority Inbox.
Here are screenshots of the Smart Mailbox configurations (Smart Mailboxes can be created by going to Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox):
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="661" caption="CLS - Smart Mailbox"]
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Something to note about this setup: When you're in the CLS Smart Mailbox and you read an email, that email will continue to show in that mailbox until you either restart Mailbox or click to another mailbox and then click back to CLS. This is sometimes nice, but other times can be a nuisance.
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I would highly recommend you trying out this email management system. It's revolutionized my email world, and maybe it will revolutionize yours? If you have questions on how to set it up, feel free to ask in the comments.
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Great tips. I'd like to tweak
Great tips. I'd like to tweak it further to use with SaneBox (www.sanebox.com) scrubbing my Gmail.
Thank you! very useful and
Thank you! very useful and exactly what I was looking for...
@Kyle - I actually am dealing
@Kyle - I actually am dealing with this in my solution. Grab me some time this week and I can show you the ropes :)
btw, you should setup a Gravatar so that your face shows up in comments on this blog and many other blogs across the web.
Thanks Erik! I set it up
Thanks Erik! I set it up like this and it works great. One problem I had was that I have more than one gmail set up on my mail account, so when I click 'any of the following' for my main account, I get all emails from all accounts. It would be nice to have an account that has both flagged and unread in it and only from classy llama, do you see a possibility for that?