Mail and Rules

sonofsylvanus

Is Mail meant to apply rules retrospectively? I recently told Mail in Mail>Prefs>Rules to highlight in red all emails from a known sender. But it has only applied this to my most recent emails - I suppose only the ones since I activated the rule. Shouldn't it apply it to ALL? Is there a way to 'fix' this so that it does?

superkarate monkeydeathcar

go to your old emails and select all, then go to message>apply rules

that should do the old ones.

kickaha

No, Mail doesn't apply rules retroactively. Nor can you set up rules to be 'Manual only' like you can in Eudora, blast it. I like to have my mailing lists sorted on the fly, since they're stored on the same server I get my mail from. My archived personal mail is stored on the home server. If, for some reason, I can get to one but not the other, then I run into serious filtering problems. So... under Eudora, I'd have manual rules that would sort known personal mail into people's folders with a simple Cmd-A, Apply Rules. Now, I can't do that because those rules would sort when the mail came *in*.



Edit:



Okay, I feel stupid. I just went back and looked at Mail's Rules in 10.3, thinking that for god's sake there *HAS* to be some way to do this.



There is.



Add a criteria that is 'Date Received is greater than n days'. If n > 0, then it won't trigger for any incoming mail, but it will trigger for any mail you select manually that came in before the current day. Not *perfect*, but close.



D'oh.

sonofsylvanus

Quote:

Originally posted by superkarate monkeydeathcar

go to your old emails and select all, then go to message>apply rules

that should do the old ones.

Er, I did what superK says. Its done what I wanted it to. Thanks ppl

sonofsylvanus

Its all a bit temperamental though - adding and removing rules isn't recognised properly \