I Hate Email

One day I'll elaborate on The Great Email Disaster of a couple years ago. I recently took the time to undo some of the damage from that aforementioned disaster and move myself back over to OS X Mail from GMail's web interface. It's good to be back. One of the first things I always set up in an email client is my "recent mail" folder. Or Smart Folder, rather. It's a saved search, really. I want it to show email that:

1. was received in the last 15 days OR
2. was viewed in the last 15 days OR
3. is flagged

AND

4. is not in one of my email list folders

Most email programs won't do that without first calling upon demon spirits. Of course, the one great exception is Mailsmith, which the state-of-the-art still hasn't caught up to entirely, as though it was some freakish product of time travel, thrust upon the year 1998.

No sense in crying over what once was.

I tried again to make this rule work in OS X Mail. Its rules limitation is summarized easily: each rule is a list of AND'ed conditions or a list of OR'ed conditions; either the rule matches when ALL of the conditions are true or the rule matches when ANY of the conditions are true.

Then, on a whim, I found that one can refer to the contents of a Saved Folder when setting up the rules for a Saved Folder. And now I can combined AND's and OR's. So:

[Smart Folder 1]

1. was received in the last 15 days OR
2. was viewed in the last 15 days OR
3. is flagged

[Smart Folder 2]

1. is in email list 1 folder OR
2. is in email list 2 folder OR
3. is in email list 3 folder OR ...

[Smart Folder: Recent Mail]

1. is in Smart Folder 1
2. is not in Smart Folder 2

Problem solved. Still ... why couldn't they just add more complex boolean support?