Take Responsibility

The first step to taking control of your Inbox is recognizing that you, and only you, bear the responsibility for making your own email manageable. If you feel overwhelmed by email, don’t point the finger at email as a medium—or at Apple Mail, your email provider, or your correspondents. You can make email work for you, but as with a diet or fitness program, it requires time, effort, and perhaps discomfort on your way to success. No app, service, or technique can do all that for you magically, even though such things can certainly help a bit.

As I said in my TidBITS article It’s Not Email That’s Broken, It’s You, email as such isn’t the problem, but rather the bad habits many people have gotten into when it comes to dealing with their email. Perhaps your mother, like my mother, was fond of saying, “This room isn’t going to clean itself up!” By the same token, I can assure you that elves will not appear overnight and answer all your delinquent email, file it away for you, and leave you with an empty Inbox. If you want to feel in control of your Inbox, that’s going to require some reflection, experimentation, and changes in habit.

So, although I can’t solve this problem for you, I can offer some tips and suggestions that, I hope, will point you in the right direction. That’s what the remainder of this chapter is about.

Consolidate Your Accounts

Since you’re reading this book, I assume you have at least one email account. Maybe you have two (personal and work)—or maybe, like me, you have more than a dozen. My excuse is that I need to have accounts for almost every major type and provider for testing purposes because I write about email. But I know lots of people who accumulate accounts (especially free accounts) for no particular reason and then end up wasting time and effort checking, managing, and maintaining them all.

So, allow me to make a few suggestions to make your life simpler and to make Mail in macOS and iOS work better.

Begin by choosing one account to be your primary personal email account. (Of course, you may need to keep work email separate, and that’s entirely reasonable.) Then, rather than send out change-of-address notices to anyone who might have each of the other addresses—assuming you can even remember who has which one—visit the web interfaces for all other accounts, set them up to forward incoming messages to your central account, and disable those accounts in Mail on your Macs and iOS devices.

Once you’ve performed this one-time procedure, your correspondents can keep using your old addresses, but you benefit by having just one place to check for incoming mail and one place to store the messages you want to save. Having fewer accounts to check will make Mail peppier, too.

If you have numerous providers from which to choose, which one should you pick for your main email account? Here are my opinions:

• Choose an account that supports either IMAP or Exchange—not a POP-only account.

• Choose an account that lets you use your own custom domain name. For example, I own the domain name alt.cc, and my main email address is in that domain. Because the domain name is under my control, I can move my email from one provider to another with minimal fuss—and have done so several times. If you don’t own your domain name, you’re stuck with a single provider forever—whether that’s Gmail, iCloud, your local ISP, or whatever—even if the provider has security or reliability problems, lacks features you want, or raises its prices.

• All things being equal, look for a provider that offers a generous storage quota, good server-side rules (or filters) and, preferably, server-side spam filtering. You’ll appreciate the flexibility of these features in the long run.

Optimize Your Mailboxes

For both email messages and files, I prefer a hierarchical organization method to one based solely on tagging/labeling and searching. However, I used to take this to extremes, with more than a hundred intricately nested mailboxes—and at a certain point, that made it harder, rather than easier, to sort and find email. Although I haven’t gone so far as to use a single Archive mailbox for all saved messages, as some people do, I’ve reduced the number of mailboxes I use to fewer than 25, and with some effort, I might bring it down even more. Having fewer mailboxes makes it quicker to file messages and involves a lot less scrolling, especially on iOS devices.

I explain why and how I optimized my mailboxes in a Macworld article called Simplify your email. The short version is: use as few mailboxes as possible, and make the categories they represent as broad, distinct, and unambiguous as possible.

Once you’ve done that, and assuming you’re using an IMAP or Exchange email account (so your server-based folders are synced between all your devices), I suggest taking two additional steps to make life easier for yourself in Mail for iOS, which always displays mailboxes in alphabetical order and which has no controls for collapsing or expanding hierarchical mailboxes:

1. If any of your most frequently used mailboxes aren’t already at the top level of your mailbox hierarchy, move them there—you’re looking for a flat structure without sub-mailboxes, or at least with as few as possible.

2. Rename your most frequently used mailboxes so they appear alphabetically before the rest of your mailboxes. One easy way to do this is to put a punctuation character at the beginning of each name. For example, change Work to _Work. Characters such as the underscore (_), hyphen (-), and period (.) work well. (Some mail servers won’t accept a space at the beginning of a mailbox name.)

3. You can further adjust the names to put them in a specific order.

   For example, if you started with this:

   _Apple

   _Family

   _Recreation

   _Work

   You might rename them like this to force a particular sort order:

   _1 Recreation

   _2 Family

   _3 Work

   _4 Apple

Now, when viewing your account’s mailboxes, you can quickly access the most commonly used ones in Mail in both macOS and iOS.

Use Rules

Rules, sometimes referred to as filters, process messages as they come in. Each rule looks for certain conditions (criteria such as a sender, subject, or words in the message body), and then takes one or more actions whenever a match is found (moving the message into a certain mailbox, sending an automatic reply, deleting the message, or whatever).

If you’re trying to keep your Inbox under control, rules are one of the most powerful tools available. Because I presort my email with rules, tons of messages that don’t require immediate attention never reach my Inbox at all; instead, they’re safely shunted to other mailboxes where I can review them at my convenience. Creating a good set of rules requires a bit of thought and effort, but once you’ve done that, those rules operate invisibly in the background.

Rules can operate either in macOS Mail or directly on your incoming mail server. The huge advantage to server-based rules is that they can presort messages before you see them—which also cuts down on the amount of mail you need to process on your iOS devices—and they do so even if Mail isn’t running on your Mac. On the other hand, rules running in macOS Mail can do several tricks that server-based rules can’t, such as running user-defined AppleScripts on matching messages, and moving messages to mailboxes in other accounts.

Depending on your needs (and the capabilities of your email provider), you may want to use a combination of server-based and local rules.

Control Spam

According to recent estimates, well over half of all email is spam. Despite government crackdowns, technological improvements, and a public that’s less likely to fall for spam than was once the case, spam continues to be a menace. I don’t tolerate junk mail in my Inbox, and you shouldn’t either. I’ve written several books and articles about spam, but I’d like to summarize my advice on stopping spam with four main points, which will get most people most of the way there.

Set Mail’s Junk Mail Filter Correctly

For spam that does make it as far as your Mac, Mail’s built-in junk mail filter is your next line of defense. But you have to turn it on and set it correctly for it to be of any use.

By default, Mail is set to identify potential spam but not move it; when Mail sees a suspicious message in your Inbox, Mail colors its sender, subject, and date brown. This forces you to wade through all that likely junk mail to view your legitimate mail. A better option is to have Mail automatically move suspected junk mail into your Junk mailbox. And while you’re at it, I strongly recommend setting the other junk mail options correctly, as Apple’s default values may not give the best results.

Follow these steps:

1. Go Mail > Preferences > Junk Mail.

2. Make sure “Enable junk mail filtering” is checked.

3. Under “When junk mail arrives,” select “Move it to the Junk mailbox.”

4. Make sure these checkboxes are checked:

   • “Sender of message is in my Contacts”

   • “Sender of message is in my Previous Recipients”

   These will help prevent Mail from misidentifying legitimate messages as spam.

5. Uncheck “Message is addressed using my full name.”

   Unfortunately, many spammers probably know your full name, and having this checked would exempt the messages they send from being filtered out.

6. Check “Trust junk mail headers in messages.”

   As I mentioned earlier, many email providers have server-based spam filters. Some add a special header to messages that appear to be spam rather than move messages to a Junk mailbox themselves. Since server-side filters are likely to be more powerful and up to date than Mail’s, it’s a good idea to make use of that extra hint.

Your Junk Mail preferences should look like Figure 28.

A word about that last checkbox, Filter Junk Mail before Applying My Rules. Ordinarily, the Junk Mail filter runs after your rules, meaning your rules process all incoming spam messages and therefore may move some of them before the spam filter gets a chance to put them in the Junk mailbox. Checking this box makes the Junk Mail filter run first, which reduces that problem while possibly producing a higher number of false positives. I’m going to assume that you’ve set up good rules—so messages processed by your rules are usually “real” mail—and suggest leaving this unchecked.

Develop an Email Strategy

All right, suppose you’ve consolidated your accounts, optimized your mailboxes, set up some rules, and brought spam under control—but you still get too much email in your Inbox. What to do?

I’ve read (and written) about many different approaches to dealing with email overload. I find I’m happiest and most efficient when I keep my Inbox empty, or nearly so. It’s not as hard as it may sound, but it requires adopting new habits when dealing with incoming mail. Of course, part of the solution involves creating additional mailboxes and filing messages there, but if you want a lasting solution, you need to do more than just move the problem from one place to another!

I described one way to do this in my (award-winning!) Macworld article Empty your Inbox, and you should feel free to use that—or adapt it to your needs—if you like it. But the truth is, my own system is even simpler, and it comes down to four main things:

• Stopping the flow of non-essential incoming email (such as mailing lists)

• Using rules to automatically move less-crucial messages out of my Inbox

• Reading and processing incoming messages (that is, answering them, filing them, or doing whatever else is required to get them out of my Inbox) as soon as possible after they arrive

• Not using my Inbox as a to do list

Former Take Control publisher Adam Engst uses an entirely different approach, which he describes in a series of TidBITS articles called Zen and the Art of Gmail. I could never stand to use Adam’s approach and he could never stand to use mine, yet both of us feel that our email is under control. That’s because we’ve each thought deeply about which parts of our email experience were bothering us and worked out solutions that fit our respective needs and personalities. So, as I said in Take Responsibility, the point is not to do things my way but to figure out what your way is, and stick to it.

Another factor to consider is how and when you process new incoming messages. Some people find they’re most productive if they keep Mail closed most of the time, opening it just once or twice a day and dealing with all their email in batches. For me, the opposite is true—having to process so many messages at once makes me anxious, and I feel more relaxed if I notice and address messages as they come in, so I never get behind. (I say more about this in my Macworld article Simplify your email.) Even so, I dislike notifications popping up when I’m trying to concentrate. So I restrict Mail’s notifications (in macOS and iOS) to badging the icon with the number of new messages in my Inbox.

Even though I get tons of email, the techniques I’ve just mentioned enable me to stay in control of my Inbox. In some situations, however, a bit of technology can help overcome frustrations with developing a manual strategy. For example, a service called SaneBox will, for a monthly fee, perform an automated analysis of your incoming messages, determine what’s likely to be less important to you, and move it out of your Inbox (providing only a brief summary). It can do other tricks too, such as providing server-based rules—even if your email provider doesn’t offer them—and automatically moving attachments to cloud storage such as Dropbox. Although SaneBox doesn’t fit my model of email management, many people find it immensely helpful.

One final tip for iOS users. I’ve already urged you to Consolidate Your Accounts, but if you can devise a scheme whereby you have just one account (iCloud, Gmail, IMAP, or Exchange) on your iOS device, do so. It’ll save battery life and network bandwidth—and it’ll make reading and organizing your messages much simpler, given iOS Mail’s limited interface. Even if you can’t achieve this ideal, set up as few accounts as you can—for example, one for work email and one for personal—and avoid POP, if possible.

Back Up and Restore Your Email

Are your email messages valuable to you? I know mine are. I’ve spent years saving them, and they’re the only record I have of certain kinds of information. So you’d better believe I back up my email along with the rest of my files, and I recommend that you do, too. See my book Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac for comprehensive guidance on Mac backups.

Import Email

If you’re moving to Mail from another email client or computer, it’s useful to know about Mail’s import capabilities. Because there are so many variables, I can’t go into tremendous detail here about the process, but I want to give you at least enough basic information to get you started.

The first thing I want to point out is that if your email account uses IMAP (including iCloud) or Exchange, you may not need to import messages at all. Simply set up Mail to access the same account you used in the other email client (or on another computer) and wait for it to download all your mailboxes and their contents.

However, if the only copy of your messages exists as files on disk somewhere, you can import them:

1. Make sure Mail can see the folder containing those files—over a network, on a local volume, or after being copied to your current Mac.

2. Choose File > Import Mailboxes.

3. In the dialog that appears, select Apple Mail if you’re importing messages from (any version of) Apple Mail, or “Files in mbox format” if they’re in mbox format. (If you need to import email that’s neither from Mail nor in mbox format, check out Emailchemy, which can convert from almost any email format to almost any other format.)

4. Click Continue.

5. Navigate to the folder containing the messages or mailboxes you want to import. Select the folder and click Choose.

6. Review the list of mailboxes or messages Mail found inside the folder you just selected. Deselect any you don’t want to import.

7. Click Continue. Mail imports the mailbox(es) or messages and stores them in a new mailbox called Import. Click Done.

You can now move the imported items from the Import mailbox to wherever you’d like them to live permanently.