How to sort Mac Mail app emails by unread THEN date

✓ both sort by date and decending.

Lewis - I just tried it in my spam box and I see the problem. If you re-sort the slider goes to the bottom and you are no better off. I wonder if Automater could creat a script? Mail doesn't re-sort continuely, there seems to be value to doing sorts both ways.

How about an Unread Smart Mailbox, sorted by date.

I guess I don't find changing mailboxes that difficult.

It is certainly easier if you keep them in the shortcut bar:

How big is your mailbox?

I had this problem but reduced my message count to < 5000 and it works now. I sort first by date, and then I choose sort by unread - I get the unread mail at the top, and all the read mail in descending date order. When my mailbox was much larger about half the mailbox was sorted in descending order and then it would be fairly random.

Brilliant. The smart mailbox option did the trick and worked for me 🙂

I too have wanted to know how to do this. It should be simple. For now, if I sort by unread-descending, it has my unread at the top, but instead of having the newest ones appear below it, it shows first replied to then forwarded emails. I wish there was a way to sort FIRST by unread, then SECOND by date. Has anyone figured out a way to do this?

Yep, it should be simple. But its crap. I will sort in the sequence you want, but only up to a certain number of messages. If, like me, you have a lot of messages, you will get the unread messages and then a set of messages sorted by date, and then random messages. Best thing to do is look through your messages and take a rough count of how many are sorted before the random dates appear and move the rest of the messages into an archive folder.

I guess the application has a limited buffer size and can't sort more than a certain number of messages. I am afraid poor old Mac OS/X is showing the signs of resource depletion due to the success of IOS... iWork 2013 anyone?