Mail is an excellent application for sending, receiving, and organizing email, whether you have just one address or several. It’s easy to make mailboxes for archiving email in categories, but at some point it gets a little out of hand.

Mailbox Menu

All of the commands to manage mailbox folders for viewing and organizing email are in the Mailbox menu, right between View and Message on the menubar.

Organizational Value

Having this easy way to build a hierarchical organization of email has been a boon for me over the years. In this sampling are some of the categories I have used, often mirroring the folders I have in the Finder for organizing my files.

Unfortunately, many of these mailboxes have gone untouched for years. The time has come to delete some old email and consolidate the list.

Extraneousness

Additionally, various other mailboxes may get created as part of a macOS upgrade or email import process. For example, these “Recovered Messages” appeared after I upgraded to macOS Mojave, because emails inside got disconnected from their previous homes.

There may be important messages inside so I need to take some time to review and sort/delete.

Altogether I have 76 custom mailboxes in my primary email account with over 6,000 email messages among them. While this pales in comparison to the 20,000+ messages I have in that account’s inbox, I still feel there’s value to this mailbox consolidation.

In fact, I think I may be able to delete at least a third of my mailboxes and even decide that most of their messages don’t need to stick around either. Check back with me in the spring and see how much progress I’ve made.