Take the 2-minute tour ×

How can I get the smart mailbox to filter email correctly? I have the following set:

Contains messages that match ANY:

Subject Contains criteria one

Entire Message Contains criteria two

Entire Message Contains criteria three

The result is no messages found. If I remove the third criteria I get messages. What I thought the ANY would take each criteria and OR them. Instead it appears to be AND ing them.

Any thoughts on how to implement criteria in an OR?

share|improve this question
add comment

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

You've got your rule set up correctly - if it's an ANY set of predicates it's as if there is an OR between them. It may be slow (and why nothing is showing up) because an Entire Message Contains has to search every email you have.

What happens if you have only criteria three and not criteria two - there may be an issue with criteria three that is causing the search to fail. (Check Console)

You can kludge a smart mailbox with AND and OR rules by using other Smart Mailboxes and the "Message Is In Mailbx" or "Message Is Not In Mailbox" predicate.

share|improve this answer
Console? Where in console? I have chained multiple smart mailboxes together to get the result I want but this shouldn't be necessary if the filters worked the way they should –  jdiaz Aug 18 '10 at 21:30
Console.app in the Utilities folder - if there is an error message it should show up there. I wasn't able to reproduce it on my end - but yes I agree that chaining mailboxes shouldn't be necessary. –  Chealion Aug 18 '10 at 21:46
add comment

For the "Entire Message" and "Contains" combination, you can use AND and OR to add multiple keywords. For example,

Contains messages that match ALL of the following conditions:

Data Received is in the date range "01/01/2011" to "31/12/2011" Entire Message Contains "invoice OR receipt"

This will give you all messages in 2011 that contain either "invoice" or "receipt"

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


