A simple and tedious fix to your Mail.app rule issues
Posted by Luke Cowell on December 20, 2007 at 08:48 AM
Some people have been having problems with the Mail.app rules in Leopard. Mail filtering rules somehow don't seem to be working the way they should.
A little sleuthing let me to a file in ~/Library/Mail called MessageRules.plist. This file contains all the rules you've created as well as the apple rules (eg. junkmail rules and 'news from apple' rules). What I noticed was that this file also contained very old rules that I had created, but were not visible in the rules list in Mail.app.
My hunch was that the file had become corrupt. So I removed it as well as MessageRules.plist.backup and restarted mail. I made some new rules and it worked! I actually think this issue may have started before I upgraded to leopard, so it's worth a shot in Tiger as well.
In Summary, remove these files:
~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist ~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist.backup
Wait, that's not tedious! You said this would be tedious! OK, as promised here's the tedious part:
Go and remake all your rules in apple mail again.
Ta-Da!