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Please Sur What have you done to my mail?

Avatar Rick Churchill
I cannot remember now what my old email looked like but the new Big Sur format seems to have a huge number of mailboxes. There is not enough room down the Ieft-hand side of my 13 inch MacBook Pro to show all the new mailboxes plus my Smart mailboxes. I have 4 email accounts and each has these mailboxes associated with them: Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Junk, Bin, Archive, Sent (again!), Trash.
(I don’t know why there are 2 Sents or what the difference between Trash and Bin is but there is nothing in Trash, Archive and the second Sent.)

If all these mailboxes are collapsed then there is no indication that a new email has entered an Inbox as the number of unanswered emails shown against the collapsed account name includes Drafts and Junk. This means to ensure I don't overlook an unanswered email I would have to open every junk mail that arrives or move it to the bin (and I get quite a few) and also remember how many draft messages I have written.

The mail icon in the dock correctly indicates the total number of unopened emails in all inboxes but through lack of space I keep my dock hidden until required.

There is a solution however that if I open Favo(u)rites there is "All Inboxes" which allows a shortcut to each inbox. Perhaps this is the way I had set it up with the old Mail but I don’t think so.

Anyone else having trouble with the new Mail?

Re: Please Sur What have you done to my mail?

Avatar Lionel Ogden
The new Mail app lists all your accounts at the bottom each with its own set of sent, deleted etc. You can collapse these lists to a more manageable size the little icon for this hides alongside the name of the Mail account and only appears when the mouse pointer hovers over it.

You are fortunate to have too many mailboxes when I updated to Big Sur it deleted all my custom mailboxes.

Re: Please Sur What have you done to my mail?

Avatar Tony Still
On Catalina, each 'type' of mail has a disclosure (triangle/arrowhead) control next to it that opens to show a list of individual accounts or collapses to show a summary. I believe my set-up is the default and I have 'Inbox' at the top but collapsed so the total number of messages is the total of new messages across all in-boxes. This is analogous to 'All Inboxes' on iOS.

The Flagged, Drafts, Sent, Junk and Bin entries work in the same way. It sounds very much like Lionel described for Big Sur.

Re: Please Sur What have you done to my mail?

Avatar Rick Churchill
Thank you Lionel and Tony. Yes in my original diatribe(!) I talk about collapsing the individual email account mailboxes.

I now see that I can un-collapse “All Inboxes” to show in which account an unread email is waiting. Perhaps this is the way I had it set up in Catalina with all the Accounts below not showing because they were off the page, as I have several Mailboxes labeled Keep, Security, etc. in which I move emails and others which are Smart mailboxes where emails are moved automatically.

However in Catalina did the collapsed account show the number of unread messages for that account because that is no longer the case? With Big Sur both draft and unread junk mail are included so the individual account does not indicate that an unread message awaits.

Re: Please Sur What have you done to my mail?

Avatar Tony Still
The Catalina Inbox counts appear only to be those unread messages in the Inbox, ie excluding those sent to Junk and Drafts. I believe those to be the most useful counts.
 
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