VIPs

In the real world, VIPs are people who get backstage passes to concerts or special treatment at business functions (it stands for “very important person”). In OS X, it means “somebody whose mail is important enough that I want it brought to my attention immediately when it arrives.”

GEM IN THE ROUGH: When You Want to Be Nudged About Incoming Mail

The Notification Center (Chapter 9) consolidates all the different programs and features that might want your attention—Mail, Reminders, Twitter, Facebook, software updates, and so on—into a single tidy list.

But if a little Notification Center alert bubble appeared on your screen every time any new Mail message came in, you’d go quietly mad. Fortunately, a Mail setting lets you tell Mail, “Don’t disturb me unless it’s really important. Like if it’s from my accountant.”

Here’s how to set up this useful filter. Choose Mail→Preferences→General. See the “New message notifications” pop-up menu?

Here you can choose Inbox only (all incoming messages trigger alert bubbles); VIPs (perhaps the most useful option—only messages from these essential people produce alerts); Contacts (messages from anyone in your address book trigger alerts—just not messages from strangers); or All Mailboxes (every single incoming message flags you).

You can also choose the name of a smart mailbox, if you’ve created one. That’s a pretty potent feature. It means that you can set up incoming messages to alert you only if they match whatever criteria your smart mailbox uses. For example, you might not want to be disturbed except when a message comes from one of your best friends and it has an attachment and it mentions “money I owe you.”

You may have noticed, by the way, that there’s no option here for “Don’t show me Mail message bubbles at all.” That’s because you do that in System Preferences.

Open System Preferences→Notifications, click Mail, and turn off Show in Notification Center. Now you’ll be left in peace when new mail arrives, no matter whom it’s from.

So who should your VIPs be? That’s up to you. Your spouse, your boss, and your doctor come to mind.

To designate someone as a VIP, follow the steps shown in Figure 16-18. From now on, lots of interesting things happen:

• A new mailbox, called VIPs, appears in your mailboxes list. Click it to see all the mail from all your VIPs (even messages you’ve deleted). Or click the flippy triangle to see your VIPs’ names, each representing messages from that person.

  

  Figure 16-18. Top: To designate a VIP, open a message she’s sent you. Point to her name. A hollow star appears; click there. The star darkens. (Or choose Add to VIPs from the pop-up menu that appears when you point to her name.) Note: If that person one day insults you, fires you, or dumps you, then you can remove her VIP status by clicking that same star again. Bottom: OS X can alert you when VIP messages arrive—and you can reply right on the spot.

• A new menu button called VIPs appears on your Favorites toolbar. Click to see all VIP messages, or click the to see a pop-up menu of all the VIPs’ names. Here again, the point is that you can jump to the messages from just that person.

• If you use iCloud, the same person is now a VIP on all your other Macs (running Mountain Lion or later), plus iPhones and iPads (running iOS 6 or later).

• Best of all, you can set up your Mac so that when a new message from a VIP comes in, an alert bubble appears in the top-right corner of your screen (Figure 16-18, bottom). That feature, of course, is part of the Notification Center, and it’s described in Chapter 8. See the box on the previous page for instructions on setting this up.