Filed under: Tips and tricks, Internet Tools
Mail.app rule to archive messages in Gmail
This is a great little tip that Mark Frauenfelder posted over at BoingBoing today. Make instantaneous backups of your non-Gmail email accounts to Gmail by creating a simple rule in Mail.app. Go to Mail—>Preferences and select the Rules tab. Click the Add Rule button. Name the new rule something like "gmail archive." Then, under the conditions section for each of your email addresses, choose Any Recipient, Contains, and your email address for that account. Then for the actions section choose redirect message and set "to" to your Gmail account.
Sure, iSync will sync your email to your iDisk if you like, but you have to run iSync for that to happen. This automatically backups your email as you receive it. Nice.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Navarro Parker said 10:51PM on 10-13-2005
Seems interesting, unless you have rules to sort your Mail.app to different folders (which would get lost went sending to Gmail).
Everyone should just buy another hard drive and make real backups of your entire Mac. But that's just me. One laptop crash will make you a backup Nazi.
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Rafe said 11:15PM on 10-13-2005
"Sure, iSync will sync your email to your iDisk if you like..."
Care to elaborate?
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Mike said 11:17PM on 10-13-2005
I prefer to have my pop address redirect through gmail and then I access my gmail from mail.app I've set gmail to archive my messages as soon as I access them from mail.app. I also send all my mail through gmail so my sent mails are "archived" as well. Gmail gives a lot of control over this sort of thing. It allows me to set the outgoing mail address as my regular mail address, so no one knows that gmail is even in the mix. I don't have to inform anyone of a change of address. Gmail rocks!
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ToeKnee said 12:30AM on 10-14-2005
I agree with Mike-- Gmail has an excellent, if sometimes a bit overzealous, spam filter. Unlike .Mac mail, you can actually go through what has been filtered out to check it, and click "not spam" on any false positives. (Did you not know that .Mac mail is spam filtered before you get it?) So all my accounts (about 10) go to Gmail, which then de-spams it, archives it, and as an added bonus, Gmail-POP is SSL-encrypted both directions, so when I am on a free wifi connection, no one can be snarfing my username/password.
I thought .Mac mail would be great, but once I found out I could not send through .Mac using one of my other e-mail addresses, I turned on forwarding and haven't looked back.
I have been using the same setup as Mike above since January 1-- now instead of swimming in spam, I sometimes worry my e-mail isn't working because nothing comes in for a half hour!
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Tim Jeffries said 2:25AM on 10-14-2005
I have 4 different accounts that Mail checks. I'd like to have a remote backup of all my mail but if I redirect this Mail won't gmail just give me another copy when I collect from it via Mail in a few moments time ...
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Extensor said 2:25PM on 10-14-2005
#3 Mike, that is just what i need. Any tutorials or guides out there that you know of? Thank. :D
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ted bongiovanni said 8:09AM on 10-16-2005
this works well for incoming mail, but not so well for outgoing mail because mail doesn't seem to be applying the rule automatically to outgoing messages. I guess I could set up a script that would periodically apply the rule to the sent filter...am I missing something?
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ted bongiovanni said 1:19PM on 10-17-2005
OK - I was missing something--the messages appear in my "Sent" items on Gmail--hopefully my mistake and correction will help others.
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Jeremy said 1:12AM on 12-26-2005
i've tried this tip a while back. i'm using gmail to back up email i received for a school account. however for some strange reason, everytime i receive mail through my school account and mail.app redirects it to gmail, i end up getting multiple copies of the redirected mail. basically every time i check for new messages through mail.app, brand new copies of the original redirected message is generated. any thoughts?
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