Use Suggestions and Tokens

As you type your search term, the Search field displays a drop-down list of suggestions—not of matching messages, but of text or other elements Mail thinks you might be looking for (Figure 22).

If you see what you’re looking for in the list, you can save yourself a bit of typing by selecting it, either by clicking it or by pressing the arrow keys and then Return.

If you ignore the list of suggestions, Mail simply searches entire messages (including headers and metadata) for the text you entered.

If Mail notices that whatever you’ve typed is part of a name, email address, date, subject, or other message header, it may display the corresponding full item in the list. Select one of those items (for example, a sender’s name) and Mail encapsulates it in a little gray bubble (Figure 23). That bubble is a search token—a unit that functions as a special, adjustable search term. Tokens are great because they make searching less error-prone and easier to manipulate.

When I say a token is “adjustable,” I mean you can change the context of where Mail searches for the term. For example, when searching for a person, you can narrow the search to messages from that person, to that person, or where the person’s name is mentioned anywhere in the message by clicking the little arrow on the left side of the token and choosing a context from the pop-up menu that appears.

Or, when the search token is a subject word (Figure 24), you can restrict the search to message subjects alone if you like.

Over the past few years, Mail has gotten smarter about how to make tokens. For instance: “yesterday” makes a date token, but in the El Capitan version of Mail, “three days ago” didn’t. Now it does! (You can also make tokens by typing “the day before yesterday,” “2 weeks ago,” “May 2017,” and so on—as well as names, email addresses, and subject words.) Even so, you can’t force Mail to make a search token; you can only take what it offers, and if it doesn’t recognize the word or phrase you type as something it can make into a token, you’ll have to try something else.

As a shortcut to creating search tokens, you can type the keyword from, to, or subject followed by a colon and a search term. For example, you could type from:[email protected] and press Return to make an instant search token for messages from Adam Engst, without having to choose something from the menu. But in contrast to using the terms Mail suggests in its menu, this approach isn’t guaranteed to produce tokens that match any messages.

You’re not restricted to using just one token. You can add more tokens if you like, and you can also include additional text (Figure 25). Just remember that whatever you enter in the Search field, Mail searches for messages containing all those terms.

Adjust Search Scope

Besides offering search suggestions, Mail makes another change to its interface as you begin typing a search term. The Favorites bar changes subtly (Figure 26) to provide controls for restricting or expanding the range of the search (for example, just one mailbox or all mailboxes).

The options you can select are as follows:

• All: Click here to search messages in all mailboxes (including Sent and Drafts) for the text you entered.

• Mailbox Name: If you had a single mailbox selected when you started searching, that mailbox’s name appears in the Favorites bar. Click it to restrict the search to that mailbox. You can also select the name of any mailbox or smart mailbox already on the Favorites bar.

• Selected Mailboxes: If you had more than one mailbox selected, click this to search all (and only) those mailboxes.

• Save: Click this button, which sits at the far right of the Favorites bar, to Create a Smart Mailbox.

Create a Smart Mailbox

Mail provides two ways to create smart mailboxes—the easiest way is to save a search, as I describe here. However, you can start building a smart mailbox from scratch by choosing Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox.

Follow these steps to set up a smart mailbox:

1. Enter search text in the Search field at the upper right of the Viewer window.

   Use any of the usual search criteria Mail supports, including Boolean operators; select where to look (one or more particular mailboxes or All; unfortunately, Smart Mailboxes don’t work with Selected Mailboxes selected in the Favorites bar) and which parts of the message to search (a certain header or Entire Message).

2. Click the Save button on the right side of the Search/Favorites bar.

   A dialog (Figure 27) appears showing your search criteria in a more structured form that you can further edit.

   

3. Enter a name for the smart mailbox (or keep the name Mail fills in automatically).

4. To add a new condition, click the plus button to the right of an existing condition and then configure the new condition.

   For example, you might fill in any of the following:

   [From] [Contains] some-email-address
[Subject] [Begins with] Fwd:
[Date Received] [Is in the last] 2 [Days]
[Any Attachment Name] [Ends with] .exe

   (To delete a condition, click the minus button next to it.)

5. If your smart mailbox has only one condition, skip this step. Otherwise, you must choose Any or All from the “that match” pop-up menu near the top of the dialog:

   • Any, like a Boolean OR, means that if any one of the conditions matches, the message appears. For example, to display any message from your mother or brother or sister in a Family smart mailbox, you should specify the appropriate three conditions (such as [From] [Contains]person’s address) and choose Any from the pop-up menu.

   • All, like a Boolean AND, works if you want messages to appear only if all your conditions are met. An example is displaying a message only if it is from your stockbroker and is unread and was received today.

6. Decide whether you want the smart mailbox to list messages found in your Trash or Sent folders, and select or deselect the relevant checkboxes.

7. Click OK.

Mail adds a new smart mailbox to your sidebar with the name and criteria you selected. If you click that mailbox icon, it should initially display exactly the same messages as your search. As you receive and delete messages that meet your criteria, the list will change.

Smart Mailbox Suggestions

Here are my favorite suggestions for making smart mailboxes:

• Show all correspondence with specific people: First, create a new Contacts group with all the names you want to include. Then, in Mail, create a smart mailbox. Choose Any from the pop-up menu at the top. Add the condition [Sender Is a Member of Group] [some-Address-Book-group] (to catch all mail from people in the group). Then add [Any Recipient] conditions for each person in the group individually (to catch all mail to people in the group).

  Make sure you select “Include messages from Sent” to pick up your messages to these people. For even better results, choose View > Organize by Conversation to display your exchanges in threaded conversations.

• Display recent unread messages: If you use rules to move messages into different mailboxes, you might enjoy seeing all your unread messages—wherever they may be—in a single place. If you like, limit these to messages received in the last day (or few days).

• Locate attachments in Sent mail: If you often send photos or other large attachments without using Mail Drop (or where the size of the attachments is too small to trigger Mail Drop), their copies in your Sent mailbox can take up a lot of space, and you probably have the originals. Make a smart mailbox with two conditions: [Contains Attachments] and [Message is in Mailbox] [Sent]. From time to time, check this mailbox; to remove attachments from these messages, select them and choose Message > Remove Attachments.

• What to do if All and Any aren’t smart enough: If you use the [Message is in Mailbox] condition, the contents of one smart mailbox can depend on another smart mailbox. This is handy when you have so complex a set of conditions that Any and All are too limited. For example, you might have one smart mailbox that lists messages from any (“Any”) of several friends, and another that lists messages that are both in the first smart mailbox and (“All”) marked as high priority.

• Look for group members: Use the [Sender is a Member of Group] option to search for messages from people in one of your Contacts groups. And yes, you can even refer to smart groups, so that as your contacts’ information changes, the contents of the smart mailbox track the automatic changes in smart group contents.