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).mailbox sorting, workflow, alphabetical, GTD, productivity, Mailbox Drawer, smart mailboxes, tips, mail.app, apple mail

Tags: alphabetical, Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, gtd, mail.app, mailbox drawer, mailbox sorting, Productivity, smart mailboxes, workflow

A few people emailed to thank me for posting the keyboard shortcut that closes and opens the mailbox drawer in Tiger.

In Panther, you will remember, an icon in the main toolbar offered a way to do this. You can still add it to your toolbar by Control-clicking on the toolbar, selecting Customize Toolbar, and dragging the Mailboxes icon into the toolbar from the palette of icons. Or, you can do it as a keyboard shortcut:

Command-Shift-M

Think – “I am in Command. I will Shift the Mailboxes”

If the existing keyboard shortcuts don’t do what you want, Chuck Toporek over at O’Reilly offers a short tutorial on how to roll your own. Remember, it’s faster and better to use the keyboard.

Although I stumbled across a dissenting view tonight from Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini (“Leading authority on software design” — HotWired) who said in 1989:

We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

— Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
— The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.

keyboard shortcuts, productivity, tips, mailbox drawer, mail.app, apple mail

Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, keyboard shortcuts, mail.app, mailbox drawer, Productivity