Automate basic email tasks in Apple Mail with Apple Mail rules. When you create Mail rules, you tell the app how to handle incoming emails. Mail rules automate repetitive tasks, such as moving the same type of messages to a specific folder, marking messages from friends and family, or deleting spam emails.

Every rule has two components: a condition and an action. Conditions are guidelines for selecting the messages an action will affect. For example, a Mail rule with the condition to look for emails from your friend Sean could have an action to highlight the message so you can easily see it in your inbox.

Mail rules do more than just find and mark messages. Mail rules organize mail. For example, rules can:

In addition to creating simple rules, you can also create compound rules that look for multiple conditions before performing one or more actions.