Mail.app not applying rules when downloading archived messages

[arebassa]

Hi all,

In gmail I have defined a lot of filters with "Skip the Inbox(Archive it)" option enabled. I receive a lot of email and I like to have my inbox as empty as possible. And also I do the sorting in gmail instead of mail.app because this way I can change to another mail client and I don't need to recreate every time all these filters.

In mail.app I have created a lot of rules like "if Message contents begin with foo then mark as read" (BTW is the only mail client I have found that does it). These rules work beautifully when I select the messages from the folder and apply the rules manually but when mail.app downloads the messages they are not applied.

I have isolated the problem and it's due to the fact that the mails are archived in gmail. When mail.app downloads non archived emails it applies the rules.

Anybody knows how I could fix this?

Cheers
--
Arnau

 

[BrianBaughn]

As Apple's Mail won't apply a rule to email unless it arrives in the Inbox you're going to have to try to get a filter at Gmail to do it. See if a duplicate Gmail filter with the added content requirement and "Mark as read" checked gets the job done.

 

[arebassa]

Thanks Brian for the reply, the problem is I haven't found the way in gmail to create a rule with "if the message contents starts with". It has the option to check inside the contents of the message but I need to restrict it to the beginning of the message and it does not support regular expressions AFAIK.

For instance, I want to set a mail a read if the first word of the mail is "done" but not if done appears in the second sentence of the email.

Anyone knows other email client that could do this?

Cheers!!
--
Arnau

 

[BrianBaughn]

Obviously, these are some specific emails you're filtering and we have no idea as to the origin of them and how/why you determined that emails with a certain first word or phrase in the message content should be handled in a certain way. Perhaps if the situation were explained with more elaboration the end result could be obtained in a different manner.

How important is removing the message from the Inbox at Gmail? If you're using Mac Mail anyway then the archiving could occur there with a rule. I'm thinking you just don't want notifications for these emails on other devices, which would make sense.

 

[arebassa]

Dear Brian,

Thanks for your help. Let me try to explain with more details the whole scenario.

In my job I belong to multiple mail list where we receive a lot of messages that are handled by other colleagues. When a colleague handles that mail, she sends a reply to all with the first word of the email as "checking". When she finishes that issue sends another message (again a reply to all) with the first word "done". Then every day I received some dozens of these kind of messages. The problem is I don't have any other way to differentiate this "junk" messages from emails that I must attend except checking the first word of the message contents.

Before using Mac Mail I was using thunderbird, it became very slow and all the sorting was done there. When I switched to Mac Mail I had to recreate all the rules in Mac Mail or in Gmail, I decided to create once in gmail and forget. If I want to try airmail I have already all the structure, the same if I want to try postbox.

Cheers!
--
Arnau

 

[BrianBaughn]

Makes perfect sense. I don't know of a way to get the Gmail server to handle that.

There's a Mac Mail add-on called "Mail Act-On" that can do a lot extra in Mail. I don't know if you can get it to make things easier than you've already got it but it definitely can "combine" rules in a way the stock app can't. Free trial.