Sorting mailbox order manually
A Hawk Wings reader emails to ask:
The mailboxes I have in Mail.app, they’re sorted alphabetically. But I’d like to order them so that personal mailboxes are at the top, and business mailboxes are at the bottom. Do you know if there’s a way to do this?
Good Question.
The Mailbox Drawer lists your Inbox and other “Special Folders” first, then your smart mailboxes and then your local folders.
You can re-order your smart mailboxes by dragging and dropping, but the local folders are always listed in descending alphabetical order.
This is not useful if your most used or most important folders start with letters further down the alphabet.
I know of two ways to change this:
You can add a number to the front of each mailbox that will force them to order in the way that suits your workflow best.
Or you can add spaces to the front of each one, which looks a bit nicer.
The number of spaces that you need will vary. In the image above the top mailbox has three spaces in front of it, the next one two and the last one one. Then the normal alphabetical ordering kicks in.
“Getting Things Done” (GTD) people may be glad to hear that the @ symbol also kicks folders to the top of the list.
These work for me, although I am always glad to hear of other ideas (UPDATE which you can find in the comments).
Tags: alphabetical, Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, gtd, mail.app, mailbox drawer, mailbox sorting, Productivity, smart mailboxes, workflowRelated posts
January 30th, 2006 at 8:33 am
I figured that might be the only way to do it. Mail is very good in someways, but has quite a few technical shortcomings (can’t stand the quoting method, the bars)…that’s why it’s taken until now to ditch Entourage. Hate Entourage’s proprietary MS crapness, but feature-wise, it’s just more powerful.
January 30th, 2006 at 8:41 am
Sure. I think you are right about the feature set. The Mail development team have taken a simplicity (anti-bloat) approach.
The good news is that this allows you to use plugins and addons to add the functionality that you need without the carrying along the features you never use.
MailTags, Mail Act-on and other plugins have transformed the way that I use Mail and extend its reach enormously.
These are my favourites:
http://www.hawkwings.net/2005/12/21/top-ten-things-every-mailapp-user-should-have/
Anyway, that’s my defence of Mail.app design philosophy against the Entourage juggernaut :)
January 30th, 2006 at 9:01 am
This is probably obvious, but other symbols work too.
For example, Nancy McGough over at http://deflexion.com likes to use the hyphen to promote folders to the top of her list (in PINE). Multiple hyphens (just like multiple spaces) give things more priority.
Sometimes it’s nice to mix symbols up. It allows you to make “groups”. This, perhaps, is the best way to put your personal folders ahead of your business folders. Assign one symbol (perhaps even the LACK of symbol) to one set of folders and another symbol to the others. If you only put ONE symbol in front of each of these different types, then it will naturally separate your folders. You’ll have a group up top (with @ in front of them, for example) and a group below (with # in front of them, for example).
(or perhaps you could put two spaces for all of your personal folders and one space for all of your business folders. That puts personal up top and business below)
January 30th, 2006 at 9:16 am
Ted: Good ideas (as usual). Thanks.
P.S. I haven’t given up on POPfile. But because it needs some modules that are not in the default OS X install, it is requiring me to refresh and extend my knowledge of Perl.
Expect a post on POPfile sometime in 2008! :)