Reader Austin Tichenor gave me yet another reason to visit Rob Griffiths’ Mac OS X Hints. This time, it was to find a way to easily reveal Mail messages that had not been replied to.
Austin writes:
Is there any way using Mail that I can create a rule to highlight emails that I haven’t responded to? It’d be a great visual reminder.
My exploration of Mac OS X Hints got me darn close to an answer. There I found a thread that reveals how to use AppleScript to display flagged or unread messages. In this thread, Apple’s AppleScript guru, Sal Soghoian, offered three scripts — one for showing all unread messages, another for showing all flagged messages, and yet another for showing all messages (essentially putting things back the way they are by default).
I modified one of these scripts to reveal all messages that haven’t been replied to. It goes like this (and please forgive the funky formatting):
try tell application “Mail” activate tell the front message viewer set the visible messages to every message whose was replied to is false end tell end tell on error error_message display dialog error_message(“Cancel”) default button 1 end try
Save the script and place it in this location: ~/Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts. When you want to see those messages you haven’t replied to, simply choose the script from Mail’s Script menu. To view all your messages, use Sal’s third AppleScript found via the link above.