Mac Mail Rules

Doing a copy first and then forwarding the email allows the email to get forwarded. But deleting it after it is forwarded deletes it both in the inbox and copy to folder.

Adding a move back into the mix, instead of a delete, put the move first.

This has got to be a bug.

Is there a way to put multiple separate rules into the system and control the order that they execute? That doesn't appear to be a reliable option either. I have put rules at the top of the list and at the bottom and they appear to get run in either some uncontrolled fixed order or they maybe get executed randomly. It is hard to tell. There doesn't seem to be any help related to this.

Back in 2008 it says that apple rules execute in the order they appear in the rules and will stop executing when they hit a "move" command. So it appears that if I want to move the email, I have to do it as a separate step since the "move" is always put at first in the actions within a rule.

I will have to try this and see if I can make it work.

I put a separate forward rule first and then another rule to move the email to a new folder as a second rule. It did the move but didn't forward the email. I think I tried this one before when I was experimenting with it and just gave up. It appears that the order isn't being followed, the move happens but nothing gets forwarded.

Does anyone have something like this working:

Rule X:

Name: BankEmails-Forward

Conditions - any of these:

MyBank.com

alerts.MyBank.com

Action:

forward email

Rule X+1:

Name: BankEmails-Move

Conditions - same as above (created with duplicate rule)

Action:

move email to new folder

The rules seem powerful enough to do this simple operation. If the rules editor didn't change the order of the actions, it should be able to do this within 1 rule. But when you save the rule, it always puts the move action first, regardless of the order that you enter the actions.

I tried the copy and forward approach and that seems to work. But now I have 2 copies of the email. When I tried to delete the email from the inbox using a rule, both the copy and the original disappeared.

I am wondering if I should delete all the rules and start over, but that experiment is a fairly big project. Some of the rules have been in place for a very long time, some go back to my 2009 iMac.

I have considered setting up iCloud to do the forwarding and then let the Mac sort out the mess of emails coming in. That means that iCloud would always have to process the emails first, but I would assume (that is dangerous) that iCloud would look at the emails prior to posting them to the imap folder for the Mac to read.

I went through and put the forward function using the iCloud website, I will see how that works. Then the Mac can just manage the email sorting. I did discover that if you don't save the rules and, for whatever reason iCloud quits, you loose all the edits that haven't been saved.

My goal is to sort the emails using the Mac and then be able to view them on my phone. It appears that the Mac consistently processes emails faster than the phone gets them so they show up nicely sorted on my phone. That has been working now for quite a while (well over a year).

I just need to be able to also forward a few emails but I still want them to show up properly on my devices too. That should have been easy but it doesn't seem to want to work.

i think it says move the message to a different mailbox. Not copy. But otherwise, yes.