The Mailbox Shortcut

Many people have figured out, just by playing around, that double-clicking the small mailbox icon that appears in the bottom corner (or right-most end) of the Deskbar will open your e-mail Inbox (located at /home/mail/in/). This feature is almost worth a Tip by itself, it's a great time saver.

What you might not know or figure out from playing around is that what happens when you double-click that mailbox icon is actually configurable, and it can do any number of things instead of opening that particular folder.

What really happens when you double-click that icon is that the file /home/mail/mailbox is opened as though you double-clicked it in the Tracker.

When you first install the BeOS, this file is a link (or alias) to your Inbox folder. But this file can be anything that the Tracker can open via a double-click. (I'll pause for a moment while you get your breath back.)

This means that the file can be a different folder, it can be an application (maybe BeMail, maybe one of the excellent third-party mail applications), it can be a stationary template for a mail message, it can be a BeOS Query.

This last item is the most exciting. You can create your own query, to find whatever mail messages you want to view the most frequently, and then rename that query "mailbox" and move it to the /home/mail/ folder. Double-click the Deskbar mailbox icon, and shazam!, your query opens and runs.

See Tip 7, Queries for E-mail, for more information about creating queries for e-mail. At least one Be engineer has created a query that searches for all e-mail messages with a status of "New" or "Read". Says it changed his life...