Smart Mail Folder Tip

Red Sweater Blog has a nice tip about Mail Smart Folders. I use Mail.app on the mac (after years of VM in Emacs) and file mail in about 20 folders and delete a lot that mostly sits in the Trash. When the trash is large I delete stuff from mailing lists and that's usually enough.

Searching for mail works reasonably well but there are extra clicks involved in looking for messages in the trash or sent folder. This tip I think will solve that for me. I have a new Smart Folder called Recent that includes mail I've viewed in the last week including if it's in Trash or Sent. Right now it only has 82 items in it so it's small and zippy, but having messages in all folders including Trash and Sent in one place is very convenient for search. This is specific to Mail.app but I'm sure it can be duplicated in other mail programs.

I'd include an image of my folder but I'm having problems uploading an image to blogger, so here's the image from the article. The differences for me is that i have to the 2 checkboxes at the bottom checked and include the 7 days instead of just 2.