Archive Mail in Apple Mail.app
I’ve been trying for the last few days to make managing my several email inboxes less time consuming and more productive. I don’t like forgetting to respond to an important email, I already have unsubscribed from newsletters and such I don’t want to hear from, and I’ve tried flagging important emails to come back to later.
I also have several mailboxes and rules to direct things like user payments (for my website) into them and mark them read so I have a receipt and don’t need to touch them manually, and I’ve turned off most Facebook email notifications, but it is not enough.
The Fix:
First, I created 3 mailboxes:
- Crap Box: Newsletters, notifications, bank alerts, etc. Things that I still want to get emailed about but don’t need to have stick around and are not urgent (ie. I can read them at the end of the night or when I have time).
- The Vault: Receipts, invoices, documents, passwords, etc. If I would keep a filed copy of it if it were printed, it goes in here. This gets it out of my inbox and in an easier to filter place.
- Archive: If it doesn’t go anywhere else and it no longer needs action, it goes in the archive. This means I don’t have to see it anymore in my inbox so I can focus on what is still there.
To make it easier to “Archive” my mail like in Gmail I added a quick keyboard shortcut. I see a lot of people do this with AppleScript, but that’s just overkill. Instead, you can add it with System Preferences → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Application Shortcuts → Add. Just type the name of the mailbox (assuming it’s unique) and give it a shortcut key combo. This works because you can use the menu to move an email to a mailbox (Message → Move To…).
Now everything in my inbox will be things I have to take action on, which makes it hard to forget about something (though I still need to go through 3,000+ emails in there and either delete, vault, or archive them).
