Learning the Mail "Rules" Lesson the Hard Way

ByMike Moffit

[First let me apologize to everyone in advance for spamming their inboxes relentlessly. OK, now I’ll move on.]

As I write this, it’s like the calm before the storm, because in the morning, everyone in my Address Book is going to discover a nasty surprise: One message from me for each message they have ever sent me. EVER.

Let me start from the beginning. I began changing (read: screwing) with my Apple Mail settings because I wanted to set an automated reply message when I’m out of the office. Sounds normal, right? Well, I figured that I needed to create a new rule in Mail to do this, but I wasn’t sure exactly how. I searched in Help, which gave me the exact directions I was looking for (by the way, I’m still surprised that today was the first time I’ve ever tried to do this). I proceeded from there, and it seemed fairly straightforward, but it was not to be.

Here was the dreaded text that appeared:

What this screen shot doesn’t show you is that the “Yes” button is highlighted in blue, so if you click through without stopping to think about it, guess what? Everyone in your Inbox gets a sweet little reply message for EVERY email they have ever sent. Fantastic.

So, please allow me to recap:
1) I’m sorry.
2) Mail rules may take a little practice to get the desired effect (in this case, do not apply rule to messages already in your Inbox).
3) For the love of Apple, PAY ATTENTION to those pop up windows when they ask you something!!

I hope this helps you before you make a dreadful mistake that even the fastest trigger finger can’t undo. Now if you need me, I’ll be out of the office.

Similar Posts

  • Geek Out America!!

    By Art Hendrickson At some point in American culture, it was determined that appearing as a geek or as “geeky”, was a negative…

  • Cold Computers

    The University of Wisconsin – Madison has setup base in the south pole. They call it the ‘IceCube Neutrino Observatory’. They will be…

  • Awesome Free Mac Add-ons

    Apple computers come with enough software to last a decade of fun use. However, sometimes there are just things you need to do…

  • AppleCare…To the Rescue

    While Apple’s products have significantly lower rates of failure than a lot of their competition, things do go wrong from time to time. When I got my iPhone 4S at launch, it would occasionally restart itself. At first, I thought nothing of it, considering I was coming from an Android device that rebooted itself so often that it might as well have been saying, “Hey, just in case you forgot you customized your splash screen, here it is again!”

    A couple of weeks ago, my phone didn’t just restart itself, but became a useless brick until I gave it a hard reset while plugged in. A quick Google search revealed this issue to be a symptom of hardware failure known in the diagnosis log as “panic.plist.” I checked my diagnosis log and there it was, three “panic.plist” occurrences in the past week. After a brief phone call with AppleCare, I was given the choice of sending the phone back to them and waiting close to a week for a replacement or to have a $730 hold placed on my credit card while they sent me a new phone overnight. As I didn’t have another phone to use, I opted for the latter.

    Normally, to have a phone sent overnight would cost $30 but because I had AppleCare, the fee was waived. Cut to today; the hold has been lifted and I have a shiny new iPhone that has yet to give me an issue. Granted, I was within the original one year warranty, but had this happened after that first year, I would be scavenging Craigslist for a cheap replacement. Thanks, AppleCare–I owe you one.

  • My New MacBook

    Small Dog received their second shipment of MacBooks today, and I was one of the lucky recipients of the $1,099 white MacBooks. Before…