by using the “match all” option, this functions like an AND operation.
in Mail.app / Settings / General, choose this second smart mailbox for new message notifications:
Results
This almost works - the first list limits to messages which are in INBOX1 or INBOX2 or INBOX3… The second list further limits to messages which are unflagged and unread. It’s close to perfect, but there are some problems…
Issues
I always BCC myself on all emails, so every reply that I send triggers another notification. I don’t need notifications for my own replies.
If I read an email, then mark it as Unread, this will re-trigger the notification, which is not what I want.
in a modern email system, Sent and Received emails are nicely threaded together, but that wasn’t true years and years ago. I’ve always BCCd myself to have nice email threads.
BCC yourself is a way to confirm your email was sent.
To set up a shared email account without the hassle of actually sharing a single IMAP account. Example: email help@example.com is an alias which forwards to help1@example.com, help2@example.com (which are independent IMAP accounts). These two accounts can be monitored by different people, but for replies to be seen by everyone, each must BCC the other on all replies.
Relying on unread never did anything good
What do you mean? I use read/unread and flagging extensively in mac mail to manage my “to-do” lists. In fact, in mac mail, you can set up colored flags, name them, and assign them to custom keystrokes:
how to prevent Unread messages from triggering? I tried adding another condition to the second Smart Mailbox by adding this rule:
The idea was that if I have already viewed the message, and marked it as Unread again, it wouldn’t trigger the rule. But this doesn’t seem to work, as it blocks all notifications. I’m guessing that not (DateLastViewed < Today-1) is evaluating to false when DateLastViewed is empty or nil.
how to prevent my own BCC emails from triggering? Adding this rule:
Seems to work - even if the From: address didn’t include the full name, it seems that Mail matches either the email or the full name when evaluating the “From” field, so this does the trick, even though I have multiple different From: email addresses I may be sending from.
Your method with smart mailboxes is really smart. To stop notifications from your own BCC emails, the “From” rule seems to work well. For unread messages triggering again, maybe try a rule that ignores messages in your “Sent” mailbox.
