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."

Apple Mail dialog box for rules

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.

First condition for Apple Mail rule

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.

First action for Apple Mail rule

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.