[MlMt] Message colouring hierarchy?

[Pierre Igot]

Delighted to be able to answer my own question here, after some digging.

While, as far as I can tell, there is no colouring hierarchy, there is a way to achieve what I want to achieve, i.e. to have a default colour for a specific email account AND a DIFFERENT colour for messages sent to that account that also meet specific criteria. The trick is to create a smart mailbox referring to other smart mailboxes.

More specifically, if, say, I have a smart mailbox that colours all my shopping-related messages in sky blue based on various criteria (From addresses, To addresses, keywords, etc.) and I call this smart mailbox “Shop”, then I can create ANOTHER smart mailbox called “Personal” that includes the inbox for my personal email account but EXCLUDES messages in the inbox for my personal email account that happen to be in the “Shop” smart mailbox.

This is done in the first pane in the definition for the “Personal” smart mailbox, which specifies the mailboxes that the smart box covers. In here, I include all messages in the inbox for my personal email account, but then I add a second condition that is actually a “None” handle that has a subcondition that specifies that the “Personal” smart mailbox cannot include messages from the “Shop” smart mailbox.

And I can then assign a dark blue colour to that new “Personal” smart mailbox and its contents.

So now ALL the messages in my personal account’s inbox are in dark blue, EXCEPT for the messages in that inbox that also meet the criteria defined for the “Shop” smart mailbox, which colours these messages in sky blue. Bingo! That’s exactly what I wanted.

It’s a bit tedious to create all the additional smart mailboxes required here, especially if, like me, you have a fairly elaborate colouring scheme and quite a few different email accounts, but it’s something that only needs to be done once.

BUT ALSO, as a bonus, to answer the OTHER question that I sent earlier today, I have found that I can create a general smart mailbox that includes all of the unified inbox with no conditions attached, leave that general smart mailbox at the root level under “Mailboxes”, and then drag and drop ALL THE OTHER smart mailboxes that I have just created for colouring purposes INSIDE that general smart mailbox, so that I can then close the disclosing triangle and hide them all from view, unless I do need to view them separately. I’ve decided to call that general smart mailbox at the root level under “Messages”… “Colours”. (Not very original, I know. But needs must.)

So in the end, everything is neat and tidy, my messages are all coloured properly, AND the only visible sign that I am using an elaborate scheme to colour my messages is a single line under “Mailboxes” with a smart mailbox called “Colours”, under which all the other smart mailboxes involved in the scheme are hidden from view.

Yey! And as far as I can tell there is no performance hit associated with using all these different smart mailboxes.

Thanks to those who responded and guided me in the right direction here. I hope that what I explained above might be of some use to other people, especially those who have stayed behind with a version of MailMate that still supports the Styles.plist with colour definitions.

And thanks to Benny for continuing to develop such a solid piece of software, even if he doesn’t always have the time to deal with individual requests from users like me who do not necessarily have an immediate grasp of all the features that he has designed and of the many different ways that they can be used. I understand that Benny’s time is limited and I hope that my experience here can be a source of inspiration for other MailMate users who aspire to exploit the software’s tremendous power to the fullest without necessarily having access to all the necessary documentation and explanations.

Cheers.

Pierre

> Hi,
>
> One more question about message colouring using smart mailboxes in MailMate, and then I’ll try to keep quiet. (I checked the manual online, but obviously it hasn’t been updated recently and doesn’t contain anything about the new colouring features yet.)
>
> I would like to know if it is possible to have BOTH a default colour for all incoming messages for a given email account AND other colours applied to some of the messages for that given email account if they meet some specific criteria.
>
> Right now, I have a default colour for each of my email accounts, and I also have coloured smart mailboxes that apply colouring to incoming messages based on specific criteria that have nothing to do with which account the message belongs to. Unfortunately, it looks like the colour assigned to the email account SUPERSEDES the colour applied by the smart mailbox. Is there any way to get it to work the other way around, i.e. to get the colour applied by the smart mailbox to SUPERSEDE the colour assigned to the email account? In other words, is there some kind of colouring hierarchy?
>
> TIA
>
> Pierre
>
> PS: Sorry if I am not always using the exact terminology expected. I am just a user with fine-grained needs :).
>


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