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,
workflow
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