Ease into the Switch

It’s not an obvious feature of Mail, but it does support rules in a way that is similar to Microsoft Outlook. You can use rules to process messages as they’re received. This is very helpful for moving messages to a folder to get them out of your inbox, but still reserve them for reading later.

It’s easiest to create a new rule by selecting a message that is like the kind you’ll want the rule to automatically handle in the future. For instance, you may want electronic statements that you receive to all be moved to a new mailbox. First choose New Mailbox from the Mailbox menu and name it “Statements.” To set up a rule to move statements there, select one of the them. Then go to Preferences from the Mail menu in the menu bar.

The Rules tab of Mail’s preferences window

Select the Rules tab on the far right-hand side of the window. Choosing the Add Rule button will slide a sheet down from the preferences window. By default you’ll see one condition that specifies Any Recipient Contains something that is probably your e-mail address or whichever one appears on the to line of the currently selected message. You can work with this condition and add others. But, for the purpose of my example, let’s change the first part of this condition from Any Recipient to Subject. The text box will switch to the subject from the currently selected message. In my case, this is “Time Warner Cable Bill Statement” which is perfect but in some cases it may make sense to trim this text down to catch all the messages you intended. By the way, having this text box pre-filled is the reason you want to select an example message before setting up your rule. Selecting the right message first eliminates the need to type the values you want the rule to operate on in most cases.

The sheet used to create or edit rules

To finish setting up the new rule, specify the action you want performed. We want to move these messages to a “Statements” mailbox, so select it from the mailbox pop-up menu. Don’t forget to give this rule a description that will remind you exactly what it is for. Now choose OK and you’re done. Mail will ask you if you’d like to apply this rule to existing messages – you should, unless you have a good reason not to.

To confirm that it worked, simply go to the newly created mailbox in the left-hand pane of the Mail window and look at the messages that were moved. From now on any new messages matching the condition you set will be moved to this folder.

If you have other messages that you’d like to perform some sort of action on when you receive them, try setting up a rule for them now. The example I provided above is one of the more common actions. There are several others and you can even create custom actions via AppleScript to get really fancy.

There is a Mac-equivalent of the popular Windows command Ctrl-Alt-Del that is often lovingly referred to as the three finger salute. You just don’t have to use it anywhere near as often. If one of your applications isn’t responding, you can bring up its contextual menu in the dock by either right-clicking, control-clicking, or click-and-holding (clicking down on the mouse, but not up until the menu appears) on its Dock icon. This will allow you to choose the Force Quit command to… well, force the application to quit. But, there is another way as well.

Select any application and press the Force Quit button

You can also press the Command-Option-Escape keys on the keyboard to bring up a Force Quit Applications window. From this window, you can select the application that isn’t responding and press the Force Quit button. Pressing Command-Option-Escape again while this window is front-most will force the Mac to restart.

Taco Loco is an app that finds mobile taco vendors near you. Taco Loco locates taquerías without a permanent address such as trucks, carts, and stands – they often have the most authentic flavors. Simply fire up the app on your iPhone or iPod touch, and you’ll immediately see nearby taco trucks on the map.