Smart Mailbox

edit your smart mailbox by adding the condition "Mail is not in mailbox " "All Mail".

Message was edited by: V.K.

timphil wrote:
Thanks for the help. I did as you said and I only get one copy of the email now in the Smart Mailbox, thanks. Though, two other things happened. First, I get one email in my inbox and one in my smart mailbox. Is there a condition that allows the email to only go to the smart box and not to the the regular inbox?

NO. a smart mailbox is not a true mailbox. it's a saved search. so you can not have an email show up in a smart mailbox without it being in its original location.

Second, All my email's spam is now showing up in the mailbox.

I suppose you mean it's showing up in the smart mailbox, right? You can add a condition to the smart mailbox not to include messages from the junk mailbox. alternatively, you can exclude junk from all mail searches in mail preferences->general.

Slight correction: "Message is not in Mailbox".

I was looking for a solution to this problem and was glad to see this suggestion. I found a limitation, however. If you use "match any" (which is a logical "or") to match conditions, then this won't work.

In my case I have a mailbox where I look for three different email domains to collect mail into the smart mailbox. Let's say they are @mo, @larry, @curley. But if I add "message is not in mailbox all mail" then I get all the mail in my inbox. I have another mailbox where I collect mail with "[discussionname]" in the subject, so this method works just fine for that because I can use "match all".

I'll need to find a way to nest these, e.g., match all (match any (@mo, @larry, @curley), not in mailbox all mail)

This will not work with Smart Mailboxes in Apple Mail as they are not smart enough for this nesting 😉
You may however construct such a search criteria in the Finder and limit searches to E-mails. With the Spotlight options:

- include Spotlight items
- Kind is "Mail"

you constrain your Finder search to e-mails and then add more criteria.

I have the same problem - i need my smart mailbox to show messages to abc.com OR def.com AND from the mailbox YYY.

How can smart mailboxes not support this? Its the most simple computer logic.

Its sounding like the use of the word "smart" may be inappropriate...

Also I am finding that if an email matches 2 criteria (e.g. it is sent to 2 people, from abc.com and def.com) then the same email message appears TWICE in the smart mailbox.

How dumb is that!

Finally, you have a great feature where you let me make a smart mailbox showing all the mail received from people in a smart group in Address Book. But why can't i see emails sent to people in the same smart group? Why would anyone only want ONE and not the other....?!!

Please can you explain how I solve these very silly bugs. If there aren't fixes, you should NOT be calling them smart.

The weird thing with the extra copy emails is that they are "ghosts". They have no content, and their mailbox name is blank, so I can 't tell where they are coming from. There's really no logic to why they would appear actually - even when an email only has one recipient it appears twice if there are 2 rules for the box (even if it only matches one rule).

I've found the simplest way to handle this is to setup groups within Address Book to perform the OR logic on email addresses.

In Mail I then set the smart mailboxes to AND these contact groups with the required mailbox to remove the dupes (using the "Sender is member of Group" condition).

There's articles around on how to edit the SmartMailboxes.plist file to handle more complex logic, but I prefer the above because it's handled out of the default apps.