Mailboxer is a smart little utility that quickly creates a smart mailbox in Mail.app for each of the contacts in your Address Book.

Developer Sven Porst feels that this is a real gap in Mail’s feature set. He really wanted a “smart mailbox per contact” option rather than the hassle of manual filing or endless rules. Then,

I discovered that Mail simply stores all the settings for its smart mailboxes in a single properly list file. And thus the simple idea to just write a little program which grabs the necessary contact information from the address book and updates that file with a bunch of smart mailboxes based on the contact information was born. Far from perfect and a bit hackish. But doing the job and – most importantly – reasonably easy to do.

Mailboxer is the result.

By default, it really does create a smart mailbox for every Address Book contact. In a nice little touch, it makes a backup of your existing smart mailbox settings at the same time (SmartMailboxes Pre Mailboxer.plist) and stores it away in your Mail folder in case something goes drastically wrong.

Each smart mailbox lists all emails sent from and sent to every email address listed for the contact:

This is a real time-saver. Still, for me, a smart mailbox for every contact is too many smart mailboxes. I would make good use of about a dozen, but not 465.

Luckily, Mailboxer saw me coming. If it finds a group in Address Book called Mailboxer, it will only create smart mailboxes for the contacts in that group.

It’s easily done. In a jiffy I created a group containing people whose emails I do need to find quickly and often — important work colleagues, my boss, my boss’s boss, my wife and so on:

Then I ran Mailboxer.

Now I have a manageable number of smart mailboxes that I will use at least ten or fifteen times a day. That’s a lot of typing into Mail’s search field that I have saved myself.

And if I find that I don’t use them as much as I thought, I can just delete the AB folder that contains them all.

Mailboxer is donation-ware and is available from Sven’s web site .

UPDATE: Sven has updated the app to fix a small bug with Company names. You can get the updated version here .

Tags: Address Book, Apple Mail, contacts, mail.app, mailboxes, plugins, Productivity, smart mailboxes

Related posts

• Mailboxer 5.0: Smart mailboxes for everyone
• Two tips to manage your email better
• Ten steps to a smarter Address Book
• Relationship Completer plugin for Address Book
• Plugin List adds 122 Leopard Mail Templates

This entry was posted on Monday, 19th March, 2007 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Address Book, Apple Mail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.