(Revised May 2008)
One of the strengths of the Apple Mail program is its rules feature. If you have created mailboxes for different types of email messages, you can have Mail automatically send email messages to the right mailbox. In this tutorial, I'll walk you through the process of creating a new rule in Mail.
To begin, open the Mail Preferences Pane
and select the Rules tab.
Create a Rule
Click the Add Rule button and a dialog
box will open. Type a descriptive name for your rule next to
Description. As an example, let's create a rule called
"Messages from Apple."

Set Conditions
Next, set the conditions for email
messages that will be included in the rule. Click the
button on the left side of the dialog box
that says From. A long list of options
appears in a drop-down menu. For our example, we'll select
"From."
Click the button to the right of From to
further define the conditions for the rule. The options on
the drop-down menu will vary according to your selection from
the first list. Note that for some options, there are no additional options to select. For our
example, we'll select "Contains."
Type the word you want Mail to match for the condition of
the rule (if needed) in the text box on the right side of the
second button. In our "Messages from Apple" example, we'll type
"Apple" so that our rule reads "From Contains Apple." If you
want you can add a second condition by clicking the plus
symbol next to the text box. We'll leave our example rule
with just one condition.

Create an Action
After you've set the conditions for your
rule, you'll need to decide what you want Mail to do with the
email messages that meet the conditions. Click the first
button on the left side of the dialog box under "Perform
the following actions" to view your options.
We'll select "Move Message." Note that we'll also need to
select a mailbox for the action. When you click the button
next to "to mailbox," all of your mailboxes, except
Smart mailboxes, will be listed.

If you want to add more actions to your rule, click the plus
symbol on the right side of the action options.
Apply Your Rule
When you finish defining a rule, click the
OK button. Mail will ask if you want to apply the
rule. If you select Yes, Mail will apply the rule to
all email messages in your open mailboxes.
Now you see how easy it is to create rules in Apple Mail.
Once you get started, you'll be able to create more complex
rules to automatically organize all your email.
Learn more about Apple Mail rules with our
Easy Guide to Apple
Mail.
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