(Music)
- [Don] Hi, this is Don McAllister
and welcome to another ScreenCastsOnline Weekly Tip video.
Another Tip video on the Apple Mail front this week,
I thought I'd take a look at setting up Apple Rules,
so this week I'll take a look at rules on the Mac
and then next week, I'll take a look at rules on iOS.
Rules are instructions that you can programme
into the Apple Mail application
to do certain things with mails,
as they come into your Inbox
and that can be based on anything,
such as the addressee or it can be the subject,
lots and lots of different parameters, that you can set up
to create very complex and very powerful rules
and this is all done with Apple Mail
straight out of the box, so let's go ahead
and if I go to my Mail system, I've got some emails here,
now this is a demo account,
so I get lots of emails from Amazon and from Twitter,
which I haven't really filtered out
at the application level.
So let's say I wanted to create a Rule,
say for any notifications from Twitter,
let's say I didn't really want these cluttering up my Inbox,
where I would like to have them is in a separate Mail box,
that I can just browse through, whenever I want to.
First off, let me go ahead and create a new Mail box,
so if I go to Mailbox and I say New Mailbox,
we'll locate it in ICloud
and I'll call this Twitter notifications, press OK,
there is my new Mailbox.
Now to set a Rule, I go to Mail and then to Preferences
and then across to Rules at the far end,
now these rules are stored on my Mac
and they will only work when my Mac is powered up
and the Mail application is running,
so that is one limitation
of running local rules on your Mac,
but let's go ahead and create one,
now I already have that email highlighted,
so if I say Add Rule and say Move to Twitter Mailbox,
so that's the Description of my Rule,
the Conditions are, If any of the following conditions
are met, so From, Contains,
now because I already have this email selected down here,
it's picked up the person, who sent the email to me,
so info@twitter.com,
I could change this, I could say,
if it was addressed To somebody,
if it was CC-ed to somebody, Elements of the subject
and lots and lots and lots
of different conditions here as well,
but we'll do it as From, Contains, Does not contain,
Begins with, Ends with, Is equal to
and then the email address here,
which I could overtype or edit, if I wanted to.
If I want to add some additional conditions,
just hit this Plus and then I can go back in again
and create a different rule, but we'll leave it
as just a From, Contains info@twitter.com.
Now once the conditions are met,
these are the actions, that will be performed,
so again, lots of options, so Move Message, Copy Message,
Set the Colour of the Message, Play a Sound,
Bounce the Icon in the Dock, lots and lots,
we can even reply to messages automatically,
forward them to different email addresses or redirect them,
delete them, mark as red, etc.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to,
well first off, I'm going to say, Mark as Red
and then I'm gonna hit Plus
and I'm going to Move the Message to Mailbox,
select the Mailbox, there we go,
there's the new Mailbox I just created,
Twitter notifications and we'll say OK.
Now I can apply the rules to messages
in the currently selected Mailbox,
if you don't want that to run, just say Don't Apply,
but I will and we should see any from that,
well, particularly this one here,
they should disappear from my Inbox,
click Apply and it's gone,
so if I close this, I see no messages from Twitter,
but if I go to here, in fact,
there were five messages in my Inbox from Twitter,
all of which have been Marked as Red
and dropped into my Twitter notifications Mailbox.
Let's do one more example, let's create another Mailbox,
we'll say New Mailbox, Location, we'll go back up a level,
so I want it to be within my ICloud account,
not within my Twitter notifications Mailbox,
we'll call this Sent to Don, we'll say OK.
Now the scenario might be that we're getting emails in,
that you want to keep a copy of,
but also you want to send it to somebody else as well,
based on, let's say, something in the subject,
let's say this Backblaze Daily Storage Cap,
now this looks like it's an alert email,
it's to do with the Backblaze account I set up
for the Synology demonstration,
but rather than forward these each time
to my other email account,
it would be nice to have a rule,
that would mark this as red,
move it to my Sent to Don Mailbox, but also forward it
to my Don@ScreenCastsOnline.com account as well,
so to do that, again, back to Mail Preferences,
we'll say Add Rule,
we'll say Sent to Don,
rather than From this time, let's say Subject,
Contains and you can see the Subject
has already been pasted in here,
so let's leave it at that,
so when the Storage Cap reaches 100%,
so a fairly critical level, No other conditions,
that's fine, we will Move the Message to Sent to Don
and we will also
Forward the Message to Don@ScreenCastsOnline.com,
we can also add a message in as well,
Text to include, This has been forwarded
from the SCO Demo Mailbox, we'll say OK,
let's do one more thing as well,
let's, hit Plus to make sure they're marked as red,
so we don't get badges here to show the unread mail items,
but that looks good, so we say OK,
we will Apply in this case,
right, so it's disappeared from my Inbox,
I'll close that down, we should see it in here, yep
and any new mail items with the same subject
will also now be transferred into this Mailbox
and be forwarded to the address, that I put in the Rule.
Now as I mentioned before,
this is fine, if you have your Mac on permanently
and you're running Mail permanently,
the rules will be applied,
but these rules are on a machine by machine basis,
they don't get synchronised,
they also don't get synchronised to your IOS devices,
so in next week's Tip,
I'll show you how to set up server level rules,
that will allow you to not worry about having Mail running,
but also allow rules to apply to mail being sent
to your IOS devices, as well as your Macs.