Using Remind Me To Keep Your Mac Mail Inbox Clean

If you like a clean email inbox, the Mac Mail "Remind Me" feature can help. It allows you to set a reminder in the Mail app for a message that will work to alert you and bring the message back into your inbox even after you archive it.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to keep your Mail Inbox clean by using the Remind Me Feature.
Now I like to keep my mail inbox clean. Nothing in it. If there is something there then I take care of it right there and then when I'm checking email. Sometimes that just means reading the message. Other times it means responding. Sometimes you have to take an action, do something and then respond. In some cases I'll add a calendar event, for instance. In other cases I may add something to my To Do List in the Reminders App.
Now in the past if there is something there that I just can't take care of right now instead of leaving the item in my Mail Inbox I add something to Reminders to remind me to do it later on. Either something with a specific time deadline or just something to my To Do List. Then I archive the email so I can keep my inbox clean.
But starting with macOS 13 there is a way for you to keep your inbox clean but also get reminded to take care of some task later on without going to another app. For instance, say you get a message like this and it is something that you just want to take care of later. You don't want to be bothered with it right now. But you want to clean out your inbox. So you could just add a To Do List item in the Reminders App so you remember to get to it later on when you've got some free time. But, you can do this inside of the Mail App using a feature that's here. Now you're not going to find it as a button here in the Toolbar or any obvious way to do this. But if you go to the Message Menu with that message selected you'll find a whole submenu called Remind Me. You can set Mail to actually remind you of this message in an hour, later tonight, tomorrow, or set a specific time.
Instead of remembering where that is in the Menu Bar you can simply use the Context Menu. So that is a right click on a mouse, two-finger click on a trackpad, or hold Control and click on the message. Remind Me is right here as well. So this will work on that message the same way the menu item does. Now if you select one of the first three then you're done. It will just Remind you in a hour, tonight, or tomorrow. If you select Remind Me Later it gives you this little calendar interface and you can set a specific date. You can do this by typing. You can Tab between these fields, you can click in the little calendar interface. There are buttons here to go forward, and backward months. Click the Dot there to jump to the current month. You can set the time here. You can Tab forward to the hour and minute and AM or PM or you can click here as well. You can also just use these arrows to say Increase the Minute by one or two. You can even drag the hour hand here in this clock to make it really easy. So I can set this to, say, Remind Me at some point in the future and Schedule.
Now when I've done that I get this little clock indicator here showing me that I've set a Remind Me for this message. I also find it here inside of Remind Me underneath Favorites. So, so far so good except that it still there in my Inbox which isn't what I want. I want to clear this out. Maybe if this is going to remind me tomorrow I don't want it cluttering up my Inbox making me look at it each time I'm going through my mail for the next day. Well, you can just go ahead and Archive this message as my might normally do using this button or I like to use the keyboard command Control Command A. It will actually archive the message just like you were done with it. Except it is still going to be here in Remind Me.
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So the first thing is this Remind Me list here is basically a list of links to messages that, in this case, are in my Archive Folder. But they also could be remaining in my inbox. So I can go through these later on. So maybe I set this Remind Me for tomorrow but I do have some time later in the day so I can go in here, select the message, and maybe take care of the task even earlier than I expected to. Note when you select a message that has a Remind Me set it shows you at the top here Mail Will Remind You about this message then.....when. You can click Edit and edit that. So you can set it for later or sooner, for instance, or click Remove Reminder to take that reminder away completely. So if I took care of this task right now then I can click Remove Reminder. It would disappear from Remind Me. I've already taken it out of my Inbox so that means it is just going to remain in my Archive Folder just like if I completed the task when I originally got the message.
Otherwise when the time arrives what will happen is two things. First, I should get a Notification depending upon my Notifications settings. The second thing is that it should move back into my Inbox. If it was already in my Inbox I'm just going to have a little message there at the top of my Inbox letting me know that this item has now reached its Remind Me time. One interesting thing to know is if you just stay here on the Inbox it may not actually appear here right away. But if you leave and go somewhere else, like I'll look at my Flagged Messages here and then go back to the Inbox, then you can see the Inbox updates through that action and now I see how this message has returned to my Inbox even though I moved it to my Archive Folder because that is part of what Remind Me will do. You can see it is no longer in the Remind Me list as now it has returned to the Inbox. You can see at the top it says now, Mail Reminded You about this message. Now I can take care of it or I can Edit and then push it back even further.
So If somebody sends you a message asking you to do something periodically you can actually still use this like that. You can now Edit this message and set it to, for instance, remind you at the end of the month and then Archive it. Then when you get that reminder you can change it to the end of the next month and Archive it again. So the message will keep coming back to you.
But if you're already using the Reminders App to remind you of things like this or the Calendar App to remind you of things and maybe even have a recurring event on the Calendar App then by all means continue using that. That's probably a slightly better method. But this is a good method for when it is just a simple email and you really quickly just want to dismiss it, get it out of your inbox but still make sure that you're going to get a reminder about it at some point in the future.
Note this is also available on the iPhone and iPad. All you need to do is tap that Reply button at the bottom and you can see Remind Me is one of the options you have. Set it up in a similar way. This isn't a function of iCloud email. You can use it with any email service that you happen to be using with the Mail App. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Using Remind Me To Keep Your Mac Mail Inbox Clean”

Sheldon

1 week ago

Thanks bunches

Michael

6 days ago

One of the most frustrating things about "Remind Me" is that once the set time expires, it no longer remains in the "Remind Me" folder. I guess I need to figure out a way to add the email to the "Reminders" app or return to using the "Flag" feature and check my flags periodically. I manage seven email addresses.

Geoff

5 days ago

I just tried this with a few different emails, but after I selected "Remind Me," the menu was gray. I couldn't choose "Remind Me in 1 Hour" or any of the other options.