How To Manage Sound Effects in OS X Mail with Multiple Accounts and Mailing Lists
I have several mail accounts set up on my MacBook Pro’s Mail.app, which has over the last several months become my favourite mail application (I switched from Thunderbird on Windows). Like many people, I find the sound effect of arriving mail to be useful when I’m not at my computer or looking directly at the dock to see when mail has arrived. For better or worse, I’ve come to rely on the sound alert.
This became a problem when I recently re-subscribed to the extremely useful XSL List (a mailing list that discusses all issues pertaining to XSL, featuring some of your favourite XML “scene heavyweights” like Michael Kay , amongst others). This is a busy list, so naturally Mail.app’s convenient mail alert sound effect quickly became a huge irritation.
I found a handy solution for this, however..
Getting Started
First of all, you need to turn off your new mail sound. OS X’s Mail.app gives you other ways of generating sound effects, we’ll use those instead (at time of writing, I am using v2.1). Go to your preferences under the general heading and just change it to “none” as seen below:
Creating Rules
Next, hop over to the Rules section. You’ll be creating a set of rules that determine individual sound effects for your various accounts, and rules for sorting your mailing list subscriptions as well.
This is what I have:
First thing’s first, add a rule for a mailing list that you are subscribed to, and tell it to go to its own folder:
As you can see, the only action I have is to move the message. Also, there’s no action to play any sound effects specified, of course.
Setting Up Normal Accounts
Next, create a rule for another account that isn’t one that receives any mailing lists. In my case, I have a work-related mail account to which I don’t subscribe any lists, to keep things nice and separated. As you can see, I like to keep the mail wherever it lands (in this case, the inbox for that account). This time, we tell Mail.app to play a sound effect for incoming mail on this account:
Ensuring Sounds Don’t Play for Mailing List Messages
Finally, we start creating rules that will play sound effects for accounts that receive mailing-list mail but for which we don’t want to hear mailing-list arrivals. We still want to hear sound effects for normal messages, though.
Notice that in th image below, I’ve set the “If” dropdown to “all”. I’ve then told Mail.app to apply this rule to any mail that comes to my gmail account as long as it does not contain the email address suffix ”@lists.mulberrytech.com”. Since all the messages in the mailing list are addressed to this address, this rule will ignore any messages from the mailing list.
Lastly, I give the last rule a unique sound effect so that I can distinguish work-related messages from gmail messages.
Follow the same steps for any other accounts that you have, and you can gain fine-grained control of your sound effects in OS X Mail without hassle.