Email is getting nuts for me so I’ve been getting a lot more aggressive about rules. Granted, I can’t do all the great Google server side stuff with my iCloud and IMAP accounts but Apple Mail does have some pretty good rules tools. So I set up my home iMac to act as my own personal email rule server and got busy writing email rules.

There was, however, a problem. The MacSparky account has been light for a few weeks. I was aware of this subconsciously. I was getting some mail, but not much. Moreover, friends who are usually very prompt in responding to me weren’t. Today I had lunch with one of my Internet heroes (not that I’d namedrop) who told me about email she was sending that I wasn’t receiving. I figured I had a rule go astray. I just didn’t figure how stupid my mistake was.

In fine tuning a rule to auto-file email notices of Paperless PDF purchases, I managed to switch the “all” button to “any”. Ugh.

So instead of looking for mail that satisfied all of these conditions, the home iMac was dutifully archiving email that satisfied any of the conditions, including email that was sent to david@macsparky.com. Someone should strip me of my propeller beanie cap.

The interesting thing is that I was getting some email during this period to the account. If it had just turned off, I would have figured it out much sooner. I think the reason for this was my kids using the computer and shutting down Mail.app. I’ve now fixed that with Keyboard Maestro.

So the rule is fixed and I’ve got several weeks of unread archived email from friends and readers. Whoops.