Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On today's episode let's look at creating special alerts for specific email that you
receive.
Let's say you are awaiting an important email from someone or you want to get a notice every
time a certain person sends you an email.
Well you can use Mail Rules to do a variety of things like play a special sound or give
you a notification when you get an email.
So here we are in Mail and the way to set up Rules in Mail is go to Mail/Preferences
and under that you have various different things like Accounts and such and you can
go to Rules here.
Rules allow you to set up specific actions that can happen when a set of circumstances
occur.
Like for instance you get a new email from a specific sender.
Let's create a new rule here.
We will call it Special Alert and we'll set some conditions.
We'll set it just to a simple one condition here that the sender From contains and we'll
give a name of somebody just we'll say it is John or we can actually go and say "is
equal to" and give it a specific email address; anyway you want to do it.
But it has to match exactly.
So the person's email address should be exactly that or the person's name should be exactly
that.
It comes through in the From email message field when you get a new email.
Then we want to set what action to perform.
So here we want to go and do something really simple like play a sound.
We have some specific sounds we can choose here.
We can use Add/Remove to add another sound you may have.
So let's just play a sound like that and it will play that sound only when you get email
from that person.
Hit okay.
We don't need to apply it to our messages there because we just want to play it on new
messages that come through.
We can edit this by simply going and selecting Special Alert there and hitting edit.
This allows us to now look at some other possibilities for alerts that we can have.
For instance we can have it bounce the icon in the Dock.
We can have it set the color of the message to something specific that way the message
will be highlighted.
There we can have it red for instance so it will show up.
You can also have it Send Notification and use the Notification Center on your Mac so
that you can see it very easily.
The cool thing is that you can do multiple ones of these.
You can hit the Plus button here to have it play a sound but also have it bounce the icon
on the Dock and for good measure to make sure we don't miss it let's set the color of the
message of the background there to red so we see it highlighted in red or we can have
the text actually appear in red in the Inbox here.
Another thing we can have it do is automatically forward the message.
So this is useful say for instance in my case I have my Mac running at home all the time
and if I'm out I will have my iPhone on me.
A message sent to my business email I won't necessarily notice until I check my email.
But I have a personal email address that actually I get my phone to sound an alert and buzz
when I get a new email sent to that.
So I can have it automatically forward a copy of that message to that email address so that
I get an alert right away on my phone when I get an email from a certain person.
You can add in here in the Forward some extra text if you want to remind you why you wanted
to get a special alert.
You can also use other criteria other than the Sender.
For instance you can use something in the Subject line and then you can tell people
that if they really need to reach you they can include something in the Subject line.
Or even if say you are working on a project you can be looking for a key word in the mail
itself.
Somebody sends you a message with the name of that project in it for instance you will
also get an alert.
So there are a lot of different variations that you can play around with to get a Special
Alert when you get an important email.
Hope you found this useful.
Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.