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:
Open up System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts
Select Application Shortcuts in the left hand menu
Click the + button and choose the application you want, which in this case is Mail
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.
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.
Comments
Trevor Gerzen
I really like this idea because I feel the same way. Gmail has ruined me…er…spoiled me(?).
In your post you say:
Where do you type All Mail? I called the Keyboard Shortcut All Mail but I don’t know that that is going to do anything.
Thanks for the post
Tom Watson
It should work. All you need to do is type it into the Menu Title field.
One thing I’ve noticed with this setup is that each time you launch Mail.app you have to actually select from the drop down menu Message > Move To. You only have to do it once, but it’s a bit annoying. It seems a bit like a bug to me, so hopefully Apple will fix it soon.
Alexis Gallagher
This is great start, much simpler than buying Mail Act-On or writing Applescript.
However, it does not quite work. Sometimes the keyboard shortcut triggers the Copy To command instead of the Move To command.
This is not too surprising. When you examine the dropdown menus, you can see that the assigned shortcut appears next to both of those commands. Presumably this is because, when you fill out the shortcut’s Menu Title with just the folder name, then the shortcut matches both commands since they both contain the folder name.
This should work correctly if, instead, you write the full name of the command. This can usually be found by searching for commands from the Help / Search box. This suggests the name should be “Move To > [foldername]”. However, unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to work at all for me at least.
Craig
Weird. It didn’t work for me, then I tried it again and it did. No clue at this point.
Ben Chun
You don’t need to explicitly move the message to your All Mail folder. You just need to tell Mail.app not to move deleted messages to the trash folder.
See Google’s recommended IMAP settings here: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78892
When I have a message highlighted and hit delete or backspace, it’s removed from my inbox but not trashed.
And I agree with you: using the keyboard preferences to set up shortcuts for filing messages in other folders is super useful!
dam
thanks. It’s great.
kendall
Just wondering, is there any way to get it to stop defaulting to “copy to” instead of “move to”? It seems like my Mac randomly chooses each time whether to copy or move the email.
Tom Watson
Kendall, unfortunately, I don’t know.
Alan Churchill
Also for those it doesnt work for…. http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20091115042357395
Jeff Bowen
Was excited upon seeing the title of this post (I too would prefer to be able to do this without any additional software) but was sad to see the quirks (have to manually select each time you launch Mail.app, sometimes copies, sometimes moves…). I use a Mail.app plugin called Nostalgy. It’s fast, flexible (it’s got a typeahead for moving to any folder), and you can assign a keyboard shortcut for it in the same way mentioned here (just assign a key to the “Move selected messages to folder…” menu item. I use command-shift-J).
It might not be better for this scenario where you just move all your mail to one folder but if you have a few (I do), it’s pretty handy for not having to take your hands off the keyboard.
Corey
Anyone know how to make this work for the control+click menu items?
I want a keyboard shortcut for “Mark All Messages as Read”.
Adam
For Lion I had to call the title “Archive” but other than that you are my hero. Thanks!!!
Marcel
I’m using Lion and it’s working calling “Archive”. I have two mailboxes (gmail and google apps). BTW what this action do is hidden from inbox and label the message as “archive”. Thanks for this “OS functionality” it’s really useful, i’m loving shortcuts :))
drewsta
I also can use “Archive” to make this work… so wonderful to clear the inbox!
anyone know how to make this work for a second account?
I would like to set another keyboard shortcut for a different account… i have more than one email account… doh.
Bradley Ayers
⌃⌘A works for me. It’s already built-in.