Application Keyboard Shortcuts for Mail.app

I like to archive mail instead of deleting it. Gmail brought this into vogue a few years back and with their unlimited storage it’s almost silly to delete anything but a few spam messages and the most mundane emails. The problem is I also like to use Mail.app as my email client. So in order for me to archive email I’ve had to drag every message into Gmail’s All Mail folder.

It’s a surprisingly slow process and I don’t even want to think about how much time I’ve wasted doing it. It’s also prone to error. I often find messages accidentally moved to the wrong folder.

So, in an attempt to fix this, I spent a few minutes yesterday trying to figure out how to setup a few quick keyboard shortcuts. I remembered reading that 10.6 made this whole process a lot easier and figured I’d give it a shot. I’ve heard of third party applications, or hacks that could do something like this but those things aren’t for me, if it’s not simple and built into the operating system I’m just likely not going to bother. Luckily it’s dead simple, and I’ve been loving it ever since.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Open up System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts

2. Select Application Shortcuts in the left hand menu

3. Click the + button and choose the application you want, which in this case is Mail

4. Type the exact name of the folder you want to move the selected message to when you invoke the keyboard command. For archiving messages in in your Gmail account you’ll want to type All Mail.

5. Choose the keyboard combination you like I went with command-return but it’s up to you.

It’s just that simple. You can setup these shortcuts for any other menu items and across as many different applications as you want. I’ve always liked the idea of keyboard shortcuts, but until now they’ve always been too much work to setup or learn. With this new preference pane you can choose whatever key combination want them to be and they’re incredibly simple to create. Kudos to Apple for getting this right.