Smart Mailbox in Apple Mail

I love the "unread"mailbox on my phone.  It's a quick way to see exactly what has not been read yet, and hides all of the other emails that I have already read.  I don't know why it took me 5 years to realize that I could do this on my desktop as well, so I opened my Mail application, went to the Mailbox menu and chose "New Smart Mailbox...".

Then I created a new rule and from the drop down menu, selected "Message is unread" and labeled the new mailbox "Unread".  Now I have a new mailbox and can quickly see my unread messages at a glance.  Kind of psyched, but I'm sure the excitement will wear off in a few hours...

Hard Drive Swap and Spotlight is Not Working

If you have recently swapped out your hard drive on your Apple computer, or ventured into hyper-speed with SSD upgrade (highly recommended), you may have noticed that your spotlight search is no longer working, or partially working.

The solution is simple... just REBUILD your spotlight database. The quick way to do it is:

1. go to system preferences
2. choose spotlight
3. click on "privacy"
4. click on the "+" sign at the bottom
5. add your entire hard drive
6. quit system preferences (you may want to restart at this point)
7. re-launch spotlight preferences in your system preferences into the privacy pane
8. click on the "-" minus sign and REMOVE your hard drive from privacy
9. close system preferences

At this point, if you go to search on spotlight, you will notice something that looks like this:

This means that spotlight is rebuilding your searching database and reindexing.  This worked great for me and I hope you have similar success.

Good luck.

Mac Mail for Heavy Users

Are you using Apple's Mail program on your Mac? If so, you may remember how fast the program ran when it first started. If you don't keep your folders small, then you may run into problems. After calling Apple support, I found out that it is recommended to keep less than 2,000 emails in your folders. I deleted about 25,000 emails and now my mail program is working so much better. It has stopped crashing and everything is working great. It took some time to delete the files out of the folders because once the emails were moved to trash, I had to empty the trash and the Mail program would choke on large trash dumps. It required force quitting a couple times when I tried to delete to many emails at once. Eventually I got through it all and now Mail is working great and so much faster.