How To Customize Your Mac Mail Dock Badge Number

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Do you see a red dot with a number, maybe a big number, in the corner of the Mail App in your Dock. Let's talk about what that is and how you can customize it. 

So if you look in your Dock and you see the Mail App Icon there you may see a red dot at the top right corner and there should be a number in it. The number may be small. Maybe just 1 or it could be massive. So this is of course the Mail app trying to draw attention to itself telling you that there is email there for you to read. 

This red dot is called a Badge. You may see other apps with badges as well. Those are also telling you that there's some number of notifications or To Do items that you need to pay attention to. Now it is real easy to turn these off for apps where you don't care about the badge and you may already know this. We go into System Settings and then you go to Notifications. Find the App that has the badge that you want to get rid of. So, for instance, let's go to Mail. You'll see here Badge Application Icon. If you turn this Off the badge simply goes away. It's no longer there as a red dot or red dot with a number or anything. For most apps this is all you can do. You can either have the Badge when the app wants your attention or not have it. But with Mail you can actually do a lot more because you can customize the number that appears in that badge. 

I'm going to turn it back On here for Mail and I'm going to go to the Mail App. You'll find the Setting for what that number represents in Mail, Settings, and then under General. Then look for where it says Unread Count. This is where you choose what that number represents. Now it is important to pay attention to what this is called. Unread Count. So no matter which option you choose it's only going to show you the number of Unread emails. But, Unread emails where? Well, one option here is Inbox Only. So the number of Unread emails in your Inbox. If I look here you can see I'm looking at my Inbox and you can see there are three Unread emails in my Inbox. You can see a blue dot next to each one of those Unread emails. The rest of the messages in my Inbox have already been looked at so they are read. If you look at the Badge it's 3, it matches the number next to all Inbox's here in the sidebar and the number of blue dots. That's because I've got Unread Count set to Inbox Only. So the Unread email in my Inbox. 

However, I can change this to All Mail Boxes. Now when I do look what happens to that number. It shoots up quite a bit! So it turns out I, like a lot of you, have a ton of Unread messages that I've Archived. These are little notifications I may have gotten or newsletters I've never gotten to reading. I simply Archived these without reading them. Dragged them from my Inbox to Archive and I ended up with a lot of unread email in my Archive. That's fine with me. I didn't read those for a reason and it's fine to have them in my Archive or any other folder or mailbox I created as unread email. I really don't care that they are read or not so I probably don't want to use Unread Count for All Mailboxes because it is just going to show me this big number that really doesn't mean anything to me. Using Inbox Only makes a lot more sense because as I read messages in my Inbox that number will go down. Of course as I remove messages from my Inbox, read or not, that will go down.

But those aren't the only options here. There's one more here by default and then we're going to look at ways you can highly customize this by adding more options here. So Unread Messages in Primary is another option. When I select that notice that now I have the number 1 there. It still says I have three unread messages in my Inbox but only 1 shown in the badge. So what's going on here?

Well, Mail has this feature where it can automatically categorize messages for you. I don't have it turned on here but I can turn it On by clicking on the More button here and using Show Mail Categories. You also have it in the View Menu. Here it is, Show Mail Categories with a checkmark now because I turned it On. Now my mail is categorized into Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. You can see the two messages that I got that were announcements of videos, videos that I posted myself. Those are under Promotions. That's a whole separate topic, of how these are categorized and how you can change how they are categorized. But the idea here is that only Unread emails in Primary will be counted for the number Badge here. It even gives you a little message here because I recently switched it. So this is a way to have Mail look at your Messages and try to figure out which ones are really important and show you a number that reflects only Unread emails that it thinks are important, not ones that appear in these other categories. 

If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com/patreon. 

But now let's look at how you can customize this even further because there are more than three options here. All you need to do is first create something called Smart Mailboxes. Under Mailbox you've got a new Smart Mailbox. Now what a Smart Mailbox is like a search, you're searching through your email. But it is going to save that search in the sidebar so we'll be able to easily reexamine the Search Results as you get new messages in. It's very much like a Smart Folder or Saved Search in the Finder or Smart Playlist in the Music App. Nothing is actually in them. They are the results of a Search. So the messages are still in your Inbox or Archive, or any other mailbox that you put them into. Nothing is actually in there. You don't move things into them and you don't take things out of them. They are just telling you what matches the search that you defined when you created the Smart Mailbox. 

So let's say we want to create one that's only going to show us email from certain people. I'll call this From Important People. I'm going to change Contains Messages That Match All of the Following conditions to Any of the Following Conditions. I can say, From Contains let's say it's from Only Specific Domains. So the From contains this. You can also do Is Equal To, so it's an exact email address. We can decide if we want to include Messages From Trash or sent. But you probably don't want those. So this will just give us everybody, say, at our company or school. I'll select Okay and now I've got this Smart Mailbox here that I can select at anytime. I can be looking at the Inbox here and then i can go to the Smart Mailbox and I can get the email that fits that definition. You can see there are five Unread messages here, if I scroll through this. So now if I go to Mail Settings and I look at Unread Count you can see it added the Smart Mailbox to the list. So I can switch to From Important People and you can see how the Badge changes to a five now to match that. 

Now I can further refine the Smart Mailbox here by Control clicking, right clicking, or two-finger clicking on it and do Edit Smart Mailbox. So let's say I want to include another domain or specific recipient. So I can say From Contains and then type something else here or From is equal to and type an exact email address here. I can have a list of five or ten people that make up this Smart Mailbox. Any email I get from them I can easily see by looking at the Smart Mailbox and then any Unread email in that Smart Mailbox will then show up as a number in the Badge in the Dock. 

Now another way to go would be to change Contains Messages That Match Any to ALL. Say I want to add another criteria item here and I'm going to have it be that the Message Is In the Mailbox and then set this to All Inboxes. So not only does the email From need to match this, but it has to be in the Inbox. So now when I do Okay you can see nothing matches that. But as an example here we know that two of those messages actually came from Patreon so if I changed this now you're going to see those two appear here, the number is 2 since both are Unread and that's the number I'll see down here. So you begin to see how you can highly customize exactly what you want to be as the Badge. The important thing to realize is you don't need to use the Smart Mailbox for anything else. You can stick with looking at your Inbox, looking at your Archives, searching your email, doing all that normally and just leave this Smart Mailbox as something that generates this number. You don't ever have to actually look at it. In fact, you may want to change its name to Badge Count, like that, to remind you what it is for. You can do so much else with this as well. 

For instance, you can set the one thing here to be Date Received and Is Today, or This Week, or In The Last, say, one month. Then add to that that the mailbox is All Inboxes. So now the Badge Count is going to reflect only Unread Items in your Inbox that you have received in the last month. So if you're one of the people that has a ton of stuff in your Inbox, you don't clear it out like I do, then you'll only get your recent stuff like the stuff that you've gotten today. 

There's even more you can do with this. Instead of From Contains you could have the sender is member of group and then these groups here are the groups that you create in the Contacts app. So you can create a complex group of people in the Contacts App just to use here as the criteria for your Badge Count Smart Mailbox which in turn is how you get that number above the icon in the Dock. 

The goal, of course, is to turn that badge number into something useful to you. So if you only want to see a number there that represents the number of Unread emails from your spouse or your boss, or your entire workgroup or friends you can create that using a Smart Mailbox and then setting Unread Count in Mail Settings to use that Smart Mailbox.

Then one final thought is you may want to create two Smart Mailboxes. One for regular use and another for when you're on vacation. So you simply switch the Setting in Mail to your vacation Badge Count that doesn't include all the people from work whereas the regular one does. Create as many Smart Folders as you want. It's easy to switch which one you're using in Settings. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.