Mail Act-On: Organize Your Inbox

Before reading this post, you may want to make a promise to yourself. You will clean up your inbox. You will keep it organized and finally actualize those “my weakness is perfectionism” claims you made in your job interview. So go ahead, build a tiny altar to GTD, and click the jump for some free life-changing inbox organization.

In-Dev software, the developers of MailTags, have a sweet little Mail.app add on for those of us who are phasing out the mouse. Mail Act-On for Leopard is a free app that lets you move, flag, color, and set due dates for messages you receive in your Inbox. All it takes is a little set up:

Before we start, it may be a good idea to get rid of your caps lock key. By get rid of, I mean turn it into an oversized easily accessible ctrl key. You probably won’t use caps lock unless you want to scream at people over IM, email, or message boards. Let’s be nice and make a key more useful. You can do this by going to your Keyboard prefs in System Preferences and adjusting your modifier keys. I bring up this suggestion because the ctrl key is the activating key for Mail Act-on and there is no option to change it.

To start, you’ll need to download and install Mail Act-On. Once you’ve launched Mail.app open up your preferences. Be sure to customize you’re Mail Act-On preferences before moving on, but I’ll use the default settings for this post.

Next, open up the rules window in your Mail.app preferences and create a new rule. For this example, let’s have Mail Act-On label the selected messages in my inbox orange and move them to my MacApper inbox. To do this I need to make a new rule and title it with a key that will activate the rule.

For Mail Act-On to notice a rule, you need to format the description in this way: “Act-On: m | MacApper Mail” where the “m” is the letter used with ctrl to activate the action, and “MacApper Mail” is the title of the action that shows up in the menu.

For your rule conditions, select the every message option at the bottom of the list. In this case, the actions I selected were to move the selected message to my MacApper inbox and to set the color to Orange.

To activate the rule I would select any message in mail and hit “ctrl m” to perform the action. When you can’t remember how to activate a Mail Act-On action, just hit ` to call up the menu.

Notice that our MacApper Mail action is on the menu as well as some other handy Mail Act-On action ideas. You can click on any of the actions in the menu to activate the rule, but once you get the keystrokes down nothing can stop your organizational powers.

It took me a while to use Mail Act-On simply because I didn’t want to take the time to set it up. Sometimes it just takes reading one more review of an app to get you to check it out. I hope this write up encourages you to finally take the time to set up a couple Act-On rules. Believe me, you’ll use them.

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