I don’t understand how Smart Folders work in Mac Mail. I have a smart folder for MacMost. Yes, the mail messages populate the MacMost Smart Mail folder. But, if I delete the many MacMost mail messages from my mail inbox, the messages also get deleted from the MacMost Smart Folder.
All I want to do is have a folder to save the weekly MacMost tutorials and I assumed that a mail Smart Folder would do that. It does save the messages but they appear in two places. Both my mail inbox and the smart folder. Please help!
Thanks,Joe
—–
Joe V
A Smart Mailbox works like a Smart Playlist in Music or a Smart Folder in the Finder. The items are IN the Smart Mailbox. Nothing is "in" it at all. It is just the results of a search performed each time you look at it. So there is just one copy of the message, either in your Inbox or any other mailbox where you placed it, like the Archive mailbox. But when you look at a Smart Mailbox it is like performing a search for that criteria, only you don't have to specify the criteria each time it does it automatically.
If you want a folder to save the MacMost emails each week, use a Rule to do that. You can use the Rules section in the Mail app Settings, but I recommend doing it at iCloud.com instead, so the rule is applied at the server level before it shows up on your Mac (or iPhone or iPad). Just set the rule to be if the message is from the MacMost newsletter email address, then put it in a regular Mailbox you create named "MacMost."
Note that I would also recommend that there is no reason to organize and save MacMost newsletters. They are handy to be able to review the last week and see which new videos have been published. But you can also just look on the MacMost website for this and see all of the videos in order or by category. You can also search at the top. After all, if you want to learn about something like iMovie, it doesn't matter which newsletter a video was in. You just want to search the MacMost site and see videos in that category.
I followed your directions and created a "MacMost" folder in my icloud.com account. Then, I created a rule to put your newsletters there... It worked perfectly.
You also cleared up my understanding of how "Smart Folders" work. I now get it!
Thank you very much,
Joe