Mail will notify you whenever an email comes in via the new Notification Center in OS X Mountain Lion. While this seems to be a pretty cool feature, it might get a bit overwhelming, especially if you have a lot of mail coming to one of your accounts, or several email addresses, each with their own high volumes of electronic communications.
It’s fairly easy to control the Notifications preferences for Mail, of course, but here’s the thing. Mountain Lion’s Mail app lets you choose one specific mailbox to receive notifications from. This can be a valuable time and attention saver, especially if you marry it to the power of a Smart Mailbox to filter even further.
First of all, let’s create a Smart Mailbox in Mail App. Launch Mail and then click on the Mailbox menu, choosing New Smart Mailbox. Add your criteria for the Smart Mailbox (here are some from an earlier tip) and save it. It should show up under “Smart Mailboxes” in the left-hand pane of Mail.
Now, click on the File menu and choose Preferences. Alternatively, you can hit Command-Comma on your keyboard to bring them up. The Notification popup menu is about halfway down the General tab window. Click on it, and you’ll see you can choose to have Notifications occur for any of your Mailboxes, including Smart ones, or you can have Mail notify you for ALl your mailboxes, if you really want to get swamped.
If you set up your Smart Mailbox right, you could just get notifications from your boss, your family, your husband or wife, children, you name it – anything you can think up to create a Smart Mailbox from you can. And then you can set that Smart Mailbox as the one that Mail will send Notifications to.
Are you using OS X Mountain Lion? Got a tip you want to share with us? Drop me a line or leave a comment below.
