[MlMt] placement of folders?

[John Cooper]

Kearney Buskirk wrote:

> Another beginning question: where to best place Mailboxes?
> 
> Mailmate Help “encourages the use of Smart Mailboxes”. If Smart
> Mailboxes are used rather than Standard, aren’t my (actual rather than
> virtual) messages then left in my Inbox? If so, seems my Inbox would
> get vast and unwieldy. In the past I’ve routed mail out of the Inbox
> into regular Mailboxes partly to keep the Inbox manageable…

I also have a number of server-side filters for exactly that reason. I 
was an Inbox-Zero type before the invention of the term, and my work 
requires me to access my mail without MailMate, or a Mac, for that 
matter. So as a new MailMate user I had to struggle with the same issue. 
I don't have the luxury of MailMate's smart mailboxes without MailMate, 
and I can't stand to see a crowded Inbox.

I've never got rid of the server-side filters, but once I fully yielded 
to MailMate's concept of preferring smart mailboxes, things got easier 
for me when I was using MailMate. For me, the trick was to create smart 
mailboxes that exactly match the contents of my most important standard 
mailboxes, and then keep the Sources section collapsed so that only the 
smart mailboxes appear. That helps avoid the distraction of seeing an 
indicator for the same message in two different sections. The smart 
mailboxes section stays expanded. I group the smart mailboxes that only 
replicate standard mailboxes together, and I use them alongside a wider 
set of truly smart mailboxes with more complex criteria.

If you don't use server-side filters, of course, you'll want to set up 
rules in your source Inbox to move your messages to the standard 
mailboxes as you prefer.

The one downside is that certain actions in MailMate automatically 
expand the Sources section, so that I have to continually close it 
again. Other than that, this is the best method I've found.