How do I get back the mail that vanished from my Inbox?

I opened mail.app on my computer to check for important messages, and there were hundreds (typical). I have an address alias on iCloud for "Business," and a rule filtering them to an iCloud mailbox of that name. I have other rules set to highlight any messages from schools, governments, et cetera differently, but I noticed that the highlight was not present on some of the .edu messages when I opened this mailbox today.


I checked the rule, and I saw no reason that it wouldn't work correctly. It's an "any" rule including "from contains .edu" and more for unaccredited schools. Confirming immediate application of the rule upon closing the edit interface nothing changed. The same ones that it worked for before still showed up, and the ones that didn't still didn't.


Not long ago (months?) I discovered I could now have submailboxes, and created one for important reference information that I intend to save/archive. So that such things wouldn't be cluttering the Business mailbox. Reminded of this I figured it would be more organized to create submailboxes for each category of important message rather than using highlights.


So I created a new rule (depicted in image). Confirming application of the rule upon completion everything in my iCloud inbox and the Business mailbox simply vanished. It's not in the trash (neither in mail.app nor computer), it hasn't moved anywhere, the new "School" submailbox is still empty, but the "Important Information Saved" mailbox and the Junk box still have their contents. None of my other mail accounts seem to be affected either, just iCloud. I wasn't logged out, there was no undo option, and restarting didn't fix it.

Mac Studio, macOS 13.5

Posted on Oct 20, 2023 1:29 PM

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4 replies

Oct 20, 2023 5:46 PM in response to Recycleur

Good call. I tried that and found it with some others in another submailbox I created for stuff sent from Apple. I checked the "Apple Filter" and it was indeed broken.


I must have been half asleep when I updated that rule last time, but I'm not sure why it didn't dysfunction until now. You see I made it an "any" rule using various official Apple emails addresses and names in the conditions, but the other month I noticed a problem in it: It was moving emails not just from iCloud with any of the listed conditions, but transferring emails with those conditions from every other email account somehow to the iCloud mailbox as well. Which is extremely problematic.


The version I had on El Capitan couldn't apply rules to accounts other than the iCloud one. So this was an issue that only came up once I got my new Mac Studio, and in "all" rules I can easily fix it by adding the "Account" restriction, and that's what I did on the Apple Filter. It being an "any" rule causing it to send every iCloud E-Mail to the "Apple" mailbox. So I suppose the only way I can fix this is by making a dozen separate "all" rules for each of the conditions… You wouldn't happen to know of a better E-Mail client I could use, would you?

Oct 21, 2023 1:30 PM in response to Moorgan

I dont quite understand your statement about making a dozen separate "all" rules for each of the conditions. Can you give an example with two or three such rules and conditions just to figure it out? Sometimes people make overly complicated decision trees that could be simplified a lot by carefully analyzing the conditions that exclude each others.


As you probably know "all" is the equivalent of a logical AND between all conditions, and "any" is the equivalent of a logical OR. You can also take advantage of the fact that once a rule is true you can add a "Stop applying rules" as an action to limit the extent of what a message can trigger.


I don't know much about other mail programs (except Outlook on Windows) but I doubt any has the ability to build complicated rule where you can mix "all" and "any", like

if (condition 1 is true AND condition 2 is true) OR (condition 3 is true AND condition 4 is true AND condition 5 is true) then do this and that.


If your mail-sorting conditions are truly complicated there would be the possibility to process them with a single rule that every message would trigger, just calling an Applescript. The possibilities are practically endless with a script.

How do I get back the mail that vanished from my Inbox?

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