[MlMt] How to *move* messages out of Inbox (or emulate such a behavior)?

[Randall Meadows]

On 28 Dec 2016, at 1:43, Dave C wrote:

> New user here…

Welcome.

> I’ve got the hang of smart folders and the ones I’ve created now 
> contain messages from mail lists (I’m subscribed to several).
>
> My goal is to have an Inbox that has none of these mail list messages 
> and only contains the remainder of the day’s mail, mostly personal 
> mail and junk.
>
> I understand that the purpose of smart folders is to mirror messages 
> to those folders without actually moving them. How can I achieve my 
> goal of having the Inbox (or maybe another smart folder named 
> “MyInbox”?) not contain the messages that are visible in the smart 
> folders?
>
> Any suggestions?

Well, INBOX is not a smart folder, so I'm not sure you can do what 
you're asking here without actually moving some messages somewhere; if a 
message is in INBOX, it's going to show in INBOX, regardless of whether 
it's also showing in some other smart mailbox.  Perhaps someone smarter 
than I will correct me, but I think you'll have to move messages out of 
the INBOX in order to achieve what you're asking for here.

If you want to go the "MyInbox" route, you can create a smart mailbox 
that includes messages from any specific mailbox (like INBOX) but 
excludes mailing list messages.

Personally, I think it's easier and more logical to move messages to 
context-specific mailboxes, and then have a smart mailbox that shows me 
unread messages in those other mailboxes; but then I've been doing that 
since LONG before "smart mailboxes" were a thing, and old habits die 
hard...

BTW, I don't know about other mail hosts, but Dreamhost requires me to 
trim messages out of my INBOX "for performance reasons"; if that's 
really a thing, you may want to consider moving messages away from the 
INBOX anyway.