Sorting/Alphabetizing your Mail Rules

So I've been banging my head against a wall for several years on this.. I run about a dozen email accounts from multiple websites and 4 companies on Mail. It works, but that means I've got 350+ Mail Rules written to manage these accounts... Mail offers no way to sort them or categorize them....

I figured out a solution today, and am posting it here (10.6) as Apple closed/archived the other related threads.....

Mail won't allow you to alphabetize the Rules list.. You can only manually drag them in OSX (10.5 and 10.6)....

BUT..

The file in question is a Plist...

it's /(username)/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist

AND.... PlistEdit Pro will allow you to sort records by a number of factors..sort of.....

So here's the quick 'how-to' for anybody who's not used to this sort of thing..

FIRST...... download PlistEditPro

1. QUIT Mail (it can't be running while you edit the .plist)

2. Go to your Mail Prefs folder and copy the MessageRules.plist file (for safekeeping)... [i prefer to copy it to my desktop and work on the copy there]

3. Opent PlistEditPro and open the file.. It'll look like this:

4. click the "Rules" triangle, to open it - - there are all your rules listed out. You can open and view any particular rule if you wish (or delete at will)....

NOW, simply sort them.. To alphabetize by name, choose Sort By Subkey ->RuleName (you can sort any way you want).....

The RuleName is the name that you see in the list in Mail, and is what you named it when you made the Rule...

5. Save it.

6. move it back to the user library folder (and make sure it is named exactly as original - - - if it isn't, Mail won't find it)...

NOTE: PlistEditor doesn't alphabetize "normally"... It sorts Capital letters before small cap, so if you use small caps,they'll be alphabetized at the very end.....

For the life of me, I can't figure out why Apple hasn't bothered to add this simple feature into Mail at any point in the past three years....