The best solution is to run Server on a Mac and set up sieveshell scripts to manage incoming messages before they're actually delivered. Except Apple has supposedly deprecated support for smtp and imap on future versions of macOS.
I did this for 2 decades, then Apple killed OS X Server. I thought about setting up on my Synology and just didn't bother in-so-far as to just forward our accounts to Gmail accounts.
I use Gmail's filtering which Mail sees as folders and more or less works like sieve rules, at least to the Mail.app. It works well for the family.
I did that for a little while, but I don't get a ton of mail, I live in a web-browser for most things, and just decided to abandon a "fat client" in favor of mail in a browser tab. It's consistent across all my devices, Macs and others, and it's one less thing to configure when I upgrade any of them.
I had a wonderful set of rules for mail. I would love to share a few very useful ones. But I upgraded from v2 folder of mail to v3 and the rules did not come along. I could not find any way to see the rules except by clicking on each one individually. They’re still on my bucket list. Is there any way to move them over? A plist or something? I still have the MAC the rules are on to get the rules.
@Emaven: All the rules are in a couple of plist files in ~/Library/Mail/V3/MailData/. I think MessageRules.plist is the old file, while there are two new files, SyncedRules.plist and UnsynchedRules.plist. It's never been entirely clear to me what the latter is - I think you want to move your rules into the former.
The Rules stopped working for me about 2 releases ago. I have a simple rule to set Junk mail as read after it's moved to the Junk box, doesn't work. Used to work, now doesn't. I've kinda given up on them at this point. I just right click and set as read every once and a while...
Comments
I use Gmail's filtering which Mail sees as folders and more or less works like sieve rules, at least to the Mail.app. It works well for the family.
I did that for a little while, but I don't get a ton of mail, I live in a web-browser for most things, and just decided to abandon a "fat client" in favor of mail in a browser tab. It's consistent across all my devices, Macs and others, and it's one less thing to configure when I upgrade any of them.
I could not find any way to see the rules except by clicking on each one individually. They’re still on my bucket list.
Is there any way to move them over? A plist or something? I still have the MAC the rules are on to get the rules.
You can't do this for rules (though of course you can have rules that apply to messages in a Smart Mailbox).
In my experience of late, Smart Mailboxes are pretty reliable. Rules, however, are ... flakey. On Sierra, they mainly don't see to trigger automatically. If I Apply Rules, they work fine - but they no longer seem to do anything when messages arrive.
Just for completeness on the "arbitrary Smart Mailboxes" front: Complex set of Smart Mailbox can take a lot of computation to apply. I used to have much more complicated sets of them, but found Mail running all the time to keep up with them. Then again, I have a huge set of mailboxes - many 10's of thousands of messages - so this might not be as big a problem for others.
It's actually hard to separate the cost of those Smart Mailboxes from another more fundamental issue: My work laptop has a connection to an Office365 Exchange server. Something about that combination is really, really expensive - to the point that Mail shows multi-second lags in responding to typing! I've tried all kinds of things to clear this up, but nothing has really worked. If anyone has succeeded at taming this combination ... I'd love to hear from you!
-- Jerry