Difference Between All Mail and Inbox

The 'all mailboxes' indicates you're SEARCHING all mailboxes, not necessarily that there are multiple copies of a message. If you only have one inbox, then 'all mailboxes' is the same as 'inbox.'

If you have multiple mailboxes, here's where the distinction becomes helpful:

In my case, I have 4 email accounts, plus extra 'on my Mac' mailboxes that I've created on my sidebar. If I know that the message I seek is on my .mac account, I can choose to search only the 'Inbox' and speed up the search considerably.

If, on the other hand, I don't remember when or where the message came in, I can have it search 'All Mailboxes' and the system will look through all mailboxes from all accounts.

In your case, even if you only have one inbox, searching 'All Mailboxes' can still help, because it also searches the trash folder and junk folder (each appear as just another mailbox to the system).

Hope this helps!

Can I ask a supplementary. I have always selected the inbox that I want to search on..(I have three separate inboxes corresponding to three email accounts). Just recently when I go to search, the results are from All mailboxes which is not what I want. Yet I can't see where to deselect 'search in all mailboxes' if indeed such an option exists.

Can I ask a supplement to the supplementary question?

I suddenly have what seems to be the opposite problem. I used to have an "All" shortcut in the Mail bar, so that when I wanted to search all mailboxes for a term, I could just click that and there you go. But it has disappeared. Now I only have the individual mailboxes that I added to the shortcut bar myself ("inbox"... "sent"... etc.)

How can I get that "All" shortcut back into the bar?

Don't know if this will help you or not. I 'fixed' my problem. At the top of the search results pane that you get (after you have typed in your search term and hit return) there is a single strip of 'buttons'. The first is All Mailboxes and clicking that will force the searches in the future to search All Mailboxes. In my case this had inadvertently been selected. If you look to the right of the All Mailboxes you will see another button and this corresponds to whichever individual mailbox you have chosen in the lh pane. Selecting this then allows you to choose which individual mailbox to search in and is driven by whichever mailbox is selected in the lh pane. Hope that helps

Thanks... but this is my problem.

I know about the strip of buttons... which is what I'm calling the "shortcut bar"

But the "All" button, which used to be there, is no longer showing.

I need to figure out how to get it back again.

Thanks just the same.

The All button only appears if you are actually doing a search.

Thanks Jeffrey... right you are!

Actually, I had rebooted mail and did a search and saw it again. I thought it had just been a glitch. But now when I try to search, it appears (only after I hit return for the keyword, which is why I didn't notice it before I guess).

Still... right answer. Many thanks.

JF

Jeffrey Jones2 wrote: The All button only appears if you are actually doing a search.

Hurray, yet more Hidden features in Apple products. Seems to be a trend. One of the most important advances of the computer age was showing ALL menu items, even ones not available (grayed out).

Now Apple seems to think that their stuff is "pretty" and that is more important than "easy to use". It's an ef'fing computer, not a human being for chris' sake. Grrrrr.

May I add on another question? I found this helpful. I tried deleting the message in my "all mail" tab in my mail and they never get deleted. They're always there. How do I delete these? Or do they never get deleted?