Your Mac Minutes
Presented by DMUG ยท Dallas Macintosh User Group
November 18, 2008 - Vol 11, Issue 1
In This Issue
Using Rules with Apple Mail
November Meeting
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This issue we explore using rules in Apple's Mail.app. Rules are powerful tools to help organize and manage your email.
 
Using Rules in Apple Mail
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If you are using Apple's mail program in OS X you can automate organizing your email with Mail Rules. Rules are actions that you create to organize mail by criteria that you set up.
 
These rules (or actions as some peole call them) are created in the Rules section of Mail's preferrences tab. To create your own rules launch the Apple Mail program and Select Preferences from the Mail menu.

You will find the Preferences selection in the drop down menu by clicking on Mail in the menu.














This will open teh main preferences window which looks like this.



Click on the Rules icon at the far right. As you can see below you will see a list of current rules. Of course if you have not set up any yet the list will be empty. To start creating a rule click on the highlited button that says  [ Add Rule ].



This gives you the action to set up a new mail rule.



Step 1 is to give the Rule a name, name it something that indicates what the rule is to do, or any name that you desire.

Step 2 is where you choose the main critera that triggers the rule action. You have two (2) choices, Trigger if any of your critera are met or only if all are met.











Step 3 once you have made the any or all choice you begin to set up the critera that is applied to the email by the new rule. You 1st choice looks like this.



So you would select the first from the drop down on the left, and thesecond choice from the next drop down.

Drop down 1        Drop down 2

















This gives you the main critera to use for this rule. In this example we chose if the email From email address Contained the desired address then the rule would apply. Example as show above.















Now you can begin to set up the desired actions if the email met the main critera. Step 4 is where you specify what you want to happen if the 1st critera is met.



Click on the [ plus button ] and this will give you another action choice.



Here on the second (2nd) chice you chose the actions just like you did with the first. Click on the From button to get the list of choices, and select the action from the second  Contains button.



As you can see here you can specify what you to do from the choices under the first button. Below we are setting up to Move (first button) the message to a specified mail box (2nd button)








Here is an example of what your rule will look like. Of course you can continue to add actions to the rule to make different things happen. Here we specified that if the email address was equal to [ bboyd@mac.com ] ( in other words if the email was from bboyd) or the Subject of the email contained [ dmug meeting ] Mail will move the email to the Adobe Mail Box and also copy the message to 01_Alpha Reference mail box.



If this is what we want all that is left is to click on the [ OK ] button and the mail rule is set up.
November Dallas Macintosh User Group Meeting
The november meeting will be this saturday 11/22/2008 at Highlander School. For directions click here.

The program will be on the Apple Program Pages, the premier easy to use productivy application. You can do almost anything that relates to paper with this program.

Come for Coffee and doughnuts at 8:15, network and meet other mac users. Main presentation, Random Access (for Q & A) at 9:15.
Your Mac Minute
Dallas Macintosh Users Group