31 Jul

Fast filing of Mail messages

Posted by admin in mac.

Reader A.F. admires Joe Kissell’s Ninja organization skills but indispensably normal a small ace more help with cleaning up his mailboxes. He writes:

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I’ve enthusiastically adopted Joe Kissell’s recommendations in his Clean Out Old E-Mail Messages apprentice. His three folder system has made my life much less cluttered. However, I keep encountering one minor hitch. When I file every email in single of my mailboxes (usually “Filed”), I’m forced to drag and drop, which is (a) a bit of a hassle and (b) has led to some errors such as filing an “Action” email in my “Filed” coachman’s seat and thereby forgetting it. Is there any practice to create either novel buttons in Mail or new keyboard shortcuts that would allow me to simply highlight the intimation and, for instance, put in motion with a click an “Archive” button (a la Gmail) to send the highlighted message to my “Filed” folder (or highlight and press a keyboard shortcut)?

A., I’ll take this opportunity to offer a helpful slight mention: Always, always, always explore the power of contextual menu commands. In this case, simply right-click (oh, okay, Control-click) on a mail message and, from the contextual menu, choose Move To, and from the submenu that appears, select the mailbox into that you’d like to move the message. If you similar to play it old school, you can also invoke this command by using the menubar to choose Message -> Move To.

If even that seems like too much trouble, you can use a utility such as Stairways Software’s $25 Keyboard Maestro to assign a keyboard shortcut to a particular mailbox within the Move To submenu. Then all you have to do is select the messages you want to move, type the keyboard shortcut, and your messages are moved.

Anyone care to offer up an AppleScript alternative?