If you’re the kind of person who gets a ton of emails and spends more time sifting through them than actually reading the important ones, then this tip is exactly what you need. Instead of having the icon display counting all the unread emails you have, the Mail.app icon will only show the number of important emails, excluding things like spam and anything else you deem less important.
To set it up, you first need to create a new rule: Go to Mail -> Preferences -> Rules, then select the Inbox Rules tab, and click on Add Rule. Name the rule Personal Email and then select the following to create the rule:
The rule should match “any” of the following conditions:
- “The sender is in my Previous Recipients”
- “Sender is in my Address Book”
Then under “Perform the following actions” select:
- “Flag e-mails with a gray flag”
The next step is to create a smart mailbox called Relevant Email: Go to Mailbox -> New Smart Mailbox. Select these options:
- Contains messages that match “all” of the following conditions
- “Message is Unread”
- “Message has Flag”, selecting the color you want from the rule above
- “Message is in Mailbox”, then select Inbox from drop-down
- “Any Recipient that Contains your email Address”
The last thing to do is to go to Mail’s General Preferences tab and, for Dock Unread Count, select the relevant email mailbox that you’ve just created. And voilà! The icon badge will now display only the number of unread emails from the mailbox that you’ve just created.
Remember, everyone has different requirements of what qualifies as important mail. These conditions are adjustable and the rules can be changed to match other conditions.
Source: Macworld
Image Credit: RapLeaf
