How to Show Only Unread Emails in the Mail App for Mac

Organizing emails has always been a difficult task for many of us, as the inbox keeps getting cluttered with the emails you receive every day. One way to organize these emails is to manually put them into their appropriate folders or tags so that they are easy to find and manage, but that manual task consumes a great deal of your time.

Many apps and tools have been developed to help you organize your emails so that your inbox does not look cluttered. One of these is the Smart Mailbox feature located in the Mail app on your Mac. The feature lets you create Smart Mailboxes that only contain the emails that pass through the filter criteria set by you.

You can create a Smart Mailbox for only unread emails, and that way you will have all of your unread emails in a separate mailbox and can then work on them from there.

Here’s how to create a Smart Mailbox for your unread emails.

Showing Only Unread Emails in the Mail App

You only need access to the Mail app on your Mac to do the task. You do not need a third-party app.

1. Launch the Mail app.

2. When the Mail app launches, click on the “Mailbox” menu on the top and select the option that says “New Smart Mailbox.”

3. The New Smart Mailbox dialog box should launch for your to enter your filter criteria.

In the name field you can enter a name that fits the smart mailbox. For example, since you are creating a mailbox that will only have unread emails, you can enter the name “Only Unread Emails.”

In the drop-down menu below you need to select the option that says “Message is unread.” What this will do is only add your unread emails to the smart mailbox leaving all other emails aside.

Click on the “OK” button to create a new smart mailbox.

4. Now, get back to the main screen of the Mail app, and you should see your newly created smart mailbox in the list. Click on it and you should be presented with all the unread emails.

5. Should you ever wish to delete the mailbox, you can right-click on it and select “Delete Mailbox…”

You can now open this mailbox, work through the emails, and after they are read they will be removed from the mailbox. However, they will still appear in your regular inbox.

Conclusion

If you would like for your unread emails to appear separately in the Mail app on your Mac, you can use the Smart Mailbox feature as described above.

Let us know if this helped you organize your emails!