A Reader Needs Help with Apple Mail Rules

Dear Apple Tech Talk:

I have been a Mac user for a long time and love everything about it, almost.

I have set up a lot of rules in Apple Mail to better manage what’s important and what’s not. Most of the rules are pretty simple and just direct mail to certain folders or delete them immediately.

Setting up Apple Mail rules seems pretty straight-forward, even for someone like me that isn’t too technically inclined. My problem is, none of my mail rules work.

I have tried deleting them and redoing them but nothing sems to help. I’ve looked on line and see other people have a similar problem but no one has come up with a simple answer.

Can you help?

Without seeing the actual rules you set up, it’s hard to know exactly what is going on. That said, we do have a couple of suggestions.

First, if your Apple Mail rule has more than one action, check at the top to see if you have selected “any” or “all”.

We have seen several instances where a user has a list of instructions for the rule and accidentally had it set to “all”, which will cause the rule not to run if even one of the conditions is not met.

There is one other issue that we have come across, that we can blame on Apple and have no idea why they would do this.

For years, Apple Mail has come with one rule built in. It’s called “News From Apple.” It comes with about 18 email addresses that Apple may use to send you information.

The purpose of the rule is to turn the email blue so it stands out from the other email in your Inbox. But Apple went one step further.

They added a second action which says, “Stop evaluating rules”.

Based on our testing, any rules that are below the “News From Apple” rule will be ignored based on this command.

There are a couple of things you can do to solve this.

First, you can place all of your rules above the News From Apple Rule. Doing this lets Apple Mail process all of your rules before it gets to the News rule, so there are no other rules to check.

The second, and we think the easiest solution, is to just delete the “Stop evaluating rules” instruction. Doing that prevents this issue from happening again.

We hope one of these tips works for you.

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