Forwarding doesn’t work in Mail rule

Question

Forwarding doesn’t work in Mail rule

I set up a rule:

If all of the following conditions are met:

Message content contains [string]
From is equal to [address]

Perform the following actions:

Forward message to [address]

It doesn't work. I have confirmed that the conditions are being met, by changing the action to "Mark as Flagged," which works fine. Is there something extra I need to set up for mail forwarding to work? I noticed a very old thread on this for Mac OS X 10.5, that appears never to have been resolved.

Thanks for any advice on this.

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013), macOS High Sierra (10.13)

Posted on Nov 27, 2017 9:26 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Bruce Michel

Level 1

124 points

Jan 9, 2018 4:18 PM in response to sharprichnorth

I simply changed the action from 'forward' to 'redirect' and it works!. Probably a more clear action in any case for me. I have been getting financial mailings to my usual address but I want the message forwarded to a different address used by a separate user on this Mac for financial stuff.

So definitely still a bug. I will report this to feedback as should you.

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Answer 2

Jan 7, 2018 3:31 PM in response to sharprichnorth

Same for me. Rules that worked before Sierra stopped forwarding. The action had two parts: the forward and change the color of the message in the list. Since the color changes, I know the rule fired. I earlier reported this to feedback. I had hoped High Sierra would have that fix. I made a trivial test rule similar to your example to eliminate any complexity but that also failed.

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Answer 3

Jan 19, 2018 11:17 AM in response to Bruce Michel

This seems to work! Thanks, Bruce. It's still not clear exactly what happens to messages when they're redirected; seems I have to add a rule to copy them back to the inbox or something. Still playing with this, but this is progress.

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Answer 4

jevoliva

Level 1

14 points

Dec 29, 2017 8:09 PM in response to sharprichnorth

I marked this as "I have this question too" -- but I will add that other actions I have with the forward action get applied (color change + flag), but it does not forward.

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Answer 5

Dec 29, 2017 8:12 PM in response to jevoliva

I phoned Apple support, and they refused to help me, saying they could not troubleshoot Mail.app rules—which I found odd. This looks like a bug to me.

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