Keeping up with email often seems like a losing battle. One thing that can help is reducing the number of messages in your inbox. Filing messages into individual mailboxes can be time consuming and inefficient. While dumping them all into a single mailbox may seem like a way to create a big mess, Mail’s search capabilities actually make it quite easy to locate specific messages.

Taking a lesson from Gmail’s All Mail feature, Mail in Lion includes a new option for archiving messages. Just select a message, choose Message > Archive from the menu bar, and the message is moved into an Archive mailbox, which Mail will create if it doesn’t exist. This feature gives Mail users a quick and easy way to file messages, getting them out of that bloated inbox.

I’d love to use Mail’s built-in Archive feature. However, it only archives to the mail server (for IMAP accounts, anyway, which is what I have). I keep my email archive locally. So, I used a combination of AppleScript and Automator to create my own Archive feature. Here’s how... [Read more on the Peachpit blog...]