Do you have an Inbox stuffed with email messages you've never filed or organized in any way? If the answer is yes, read on to find out how to organize those messages with Apple's Mail program. With a little bit of time, you can clear out that Inbox and have all the messages neatly organized and stored away in mailboxes.
Mailboxes
The foundation for organizing your email messages in Mail is the Mailboxes pane on the left side of the main Mail window. With Mail, you can create mailboxes and nested mailboxes and you can easily move or copy email messages from one mailbox to another. Creating a new mailbox is easy - just click the plus symbol under the Mailboxes pane, name your mailbox and select a location for it. The best way to get started organizing all those Inbox email messages is to plan and create levels of mailboxes. For example, I have a top level "Business" mailbox that includes several nested mailboxes for "ezine" mail, "ebooks" mail and "Marketing" mail. The nested mailboxes also contain nested mailboxes.
Smart Mailboxes
With Mac OS X 10.4, Apple introduced a special type of mailbox called a Smart mailbox. You can set criteria for email messages you want in a Smart mailbox and links to all messages that meet those criteria will be placed in the mailbox. Each time you receive new messages that meet the criteria you specified, links to those messages will be automatically added to the Smart mailbox. Once you've started using Smart mailboxes, you'll find they are very useful. For example, I have a Smart mailbox for business email that arrives today so I can quickly answer those important messages without wading through the hundreds of other messages I may receive today.
Mailbox Rules
One of Mail's most powerful tools for managing email messages is the use of rules. Like Smart mailboxes, rules use criteria but, for rules, you set the criteria on Mail's Preferences Pane. With email rules, you can have Mail automatically copy or move messages from your Inbox as they are received to one of the mailboxes you've created. For example, I have a rule that automatically moves my ebook business messages to a mailbox I created for just those messages.
Message Threads
Another way Mail lets you organize your email messages is with message threads. When message threading is on, all messages with the same subject will be grouped together and highlighted in a color of your choice. This is an easy way to view all email messages you've sent and received on one particular topic.
As you can see, organizing your email in Apple's Mail program isn't that difficult if you use nested mailboxes, Smart mailboxes, rules, and message threading. So don't wait, get started organizing all those Inbox messages now.
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