Apple Mail Rules and IMAP folders

Over the past few days, I have been reorganising my rules in Mail.app to match some new server arrangements and as part of grappling with Getting Things Done.

In the process, I drove myself crazy and discovered something about rules and IMAP folders that I never knew before.

In the Rules pane of Apple Mail’s Preferences, the drop-down menu for selecting which mailbox a rule should move or copy an email to will only show the IMAP mailboxes that are visible in the Mailbox Drawer.

So, a Mailbox Drawer in the state on the left produces a Rules drop-down menu like the one of the right:

drawer_collapsedrules_collapsed

I must have spent two hours trying to get the sub-folders in the Trinity IMAP account to display in the rule drop-down menu so that I could select one of them. It would be too embarrassing to go through all the things I did in the hope that it would fix it.

In fact, as I discovered by accident, all I had to do was expand the mailbox tree in the Mailbox Drawer. Then all the IMAP mailboxes are available for selecting in the Rules menu:

drawer_expandedrules_expanded

I can’t believe I didn’t know that. I can’t believe how much time I wasted.

  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Delicious
  • StumbleUpon
  • Evernote
  • Share/Bookmark
Tags: , , ,

Related posts


3 Responses to “Apple Mail Rules and IMAP folders”

  1. Dan Ridley says:

    Erm… you do know this is a heirarchal menu? I just double-checked on my copy of Mail, and I can assign a rule to a folder at any depth down the submenus.

  2. Tim says:

    Sadly, this is exactly what I didn’t know :-(

    Perhaps it’s plainly obvious to others, but I posted this because I would hate to think that anyone else might suffer through the frustration of this.

  3. Chris Brown says:

    I had the same prob just last night, as I’ve been setting up an IMAP account using Mail. Fortunately for me I had already had one folder expanded when I first went to set up the rule, so I could see that one open in the list, but not the others. When I went back and expanded the folder in the drawer, the subs became available in the rules gizmo. (tech speak, sorry) I think this is a bug, personally. If the rules gizmo can see the parent folder, and already ‘knows’ there are children, but can’t display them unless you go and unwhirl them in the drawer, what good is that? Bug, bug, big ugly bug.

Leave a Reply