Create an Apple Mail rule that contains two conditionals or applies a condition to a single mail box

Barney-15E,

Thank you so much for your reply.

For clarity here is the basic structure of the existing rule:

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

If ANY of the following conditions are met:

From | is equal to | email at washingtonpost dot com

From | is equal to | nytdirect at nytimes dot com

... (many more conditions)

Perform the following actions:

Move Message | to mailbox: | 'Subscriptions'

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

About your statement:

"The older than criteria would only trigger if you run the rule manually."

Running a rule manually is completely acceptable. Setting up a way to do this is the entire issue.

About your statement:

"Rules only automatically run on new messages arriving in the inbox."

This doesn't appear to be the case in my experience. Or, am I misunderstanding you in some way.

Here is what I've observed:

After creating the rule (and after each edit adding new a condition)

all messages, no matter their age, are were moved to the 'subscriptions' mailbox.

About your suggestion:

"Just click the add button in the criteria list to add more criteria."

It appears to be a bit more complicated than adding criteria to the rule.

Here's why:

1. The goal is to delete messages older than 14 days. So, the condition would be:

"Date received | is greater than | 14 | days old"

This is insufficient for the reasons below

2. The action to perform also needs to change:

a.) "Move Message | to mailbox: | 'Subscriptions'"

b.) changes to: "Delete Message"

(Now this is an entirely new rule but that's not the problem).

3. It's the CONDITION statement gums up the works. Using either "ANY" or "ALL" present serious problems:

The problems are illustrated below in the two alternative structures.

The rule with the ANY (OR) condition:

(Yielding undesirable results - Because ANY older messages in any mailboxes meeting any condition are deleted)

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

If ANY of the following conditions are met:

From | is equal to | email at washingtonpost dot com

From | is equal to | nytdirect at nytimes dot com

Date received | is greater than | 14 | days old

Perform the following actions:

Delete Message

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

The rule with the ALL (AND) condition:

(No Action taken - Because ALL conditions are tested against each and every message)

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

If ALL of the following conditions are met:

From | is equal to | email at washingtonpost dot com

From | is equal to | nytdirect at nytimes dot com

Date received | is greater than | 14 | days old

Perform the following actions:

Delete Message

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

SUMMARY as I see it:

From all I've seen and tried there appears to be no way to either:

a.) Apply the delete criteria against a list of senders (i.e. "Washington Post", "New York Times", ..).

b.) Or apply the delete criteria against only messages in the 'Subscriptions' mailbox

Unless I'm missing something I think we're back at my original question.

I don't know what you are observing. That's how it works. Rules run automatically on the inbox on incoming messages. It doesn't run on the entire inbox.

Here's what I observe and how it happened for me:

• The day I created the rule I had received only 21 messages from the list of senders.
• However, after creating the rule it moved 5,854 messages into my brand new "Subscription" mailbox.
• The messages span in age from received that day all the way back to four years ago.

At first I was confused on how rules worked in Apple Mail. I come from Microsoft Outlook.

After making the rule I only saw one new message added to the mailbox. I thought it either stopped or only worked on incoming messages. I looked in the menu and saw: Message > Apply Rules. I clicked that. Later, maybe or maybe not having anything to do with using the menu I noticed there to be over a thousand messages in the mailbox and still later all nearly 6,000 that are there now. That is my experience.

I'd be interested in how you get your rule to only operate against new mail. You have the rather straight forward configuration of the rule I'm using.

Make a smart mailbox that includes all of the addresses you wish to collect.

Use All

Date Received is not in the last 14 days

message is in mailbox <Subscription Smart Mailbox>

I did as you suggested.

Here's a description of my results, an observational note and the construction of my Smart Mailbox:

Using All - Returns an empty set

(Observational Note: empty because ALL = AND and sender can't be Washington Post AND New York Times)

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Smart Mailbox Name: Old Subscriptions

Contains messages that match ALL of the following conditions:

From | is equal to | email at washingtonpost dot com

From | is equal to | nytdirect at nytimes dot com

Date received | is not in the last | 14 | days

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Then I changed ALL to ANY.

Here's a description of my results, an observational note, and the construction of my Smart Mailbox:

Using ANY - Returns all my mail not in the last 14 days from every mailbox that I have an account for configured within Apple mail - About 23,000 messages - representing the size of all my mailboxes minus 14 days

(Observational Note: Based on the number of messages in 'Subscriptions' and the number added per day - If the Smart Mailbox would let me put an AND in front of the date CONDITION the set would contain about 5,500 messages.)

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Smart Mailbox Name: Old Subscriptions

Contains messages that match ANY of the following conditions:

From | is equal to | email at washingtonpost dot com

From | is equal to | nytdirect at nytimes dot com

Date received | is not in the last | 14 | days

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

It looks like there's no solution available within Apple Mail - Neither Rules nor Smart Mailbox has a way to:

a.) Apply the delete criteria against a list of senders (i.e. "Washington Post", "New York Times", ..).

b.) Or apply the delete criteria against only messages in the 'Subscriptions' mailbox

Unless you have any other ideas I think I need to send feedback to Apple requesting a way to have more options in these tools.

Thank you for this clarification. I understand things better but I still need a bit more clarification.

When creating a rule it asks [Don't Apply] or [Apply] to indicate if one wants to apply the rule to only new mail or all mail. (I didn't really see where one is asked if is to be configured "manually" unless I don't understand what that means.

My observation and related question is: The selection one makes doesn't create the rule with any visible differences so how would one know the configured behavior of the rule without remembering or without performing some sort of investigation of the results? After all contents of mail can be very voluminous and complex.