Using Folders
Move mail out of your inbox and into a structure. Your inbox stays actionable, and finding anything gets dramatically easier.
📁 Why Folders Beat a Giant Inbox
An inbox holding everything you’ve ever received stops being useful: new mail that needs your attention drowns in thousands of messages that don’t. Folders fix both halves of the problem:
- Your inbox becomes a to-do list. If mail that’s merely kept lives in folders, everything still sitting in the inbox is, by definition, something needing action. Triage gets fast and nothing slips.
- Finding things becomes navigation plus a small search. Looking for a receipt in one all-purpose inbox means searching everything you’ve ever received and wading through every sender who ever said “receipt.” With a Shopping folder, you open it and search just there: a far smaller haystack, so the search is quicker to run and the results are almost all relevant.
- Context comes free. Opening the Finance folder shows your financial mail together, newest first, with its own unread count in the sidebar, no query needed at all.
Combined with CodaMail’s category addresses, folders practically fill themselves; that’s the next two sections.
➕ Creating Folders
- Go to Settings → Folders.
- Click the + (Create) button.
- Enter a Folder name, and optionally choose a Parent folder to nest it inside an existing one.
- Save. The folder appears in your folder list immediately.
Folders nest as deeply as you like (Shopping → Amazon, Finance → Taxes → 2026…), and parent folders collapse and expand in the sidebar so a large structure stays tidy. From the same screen you can rename or delete folders, and the Subscribed checkboxes control which folders are visible in your mail view. Each folder’s size is shown, so you always know where your storage is going.
A good starting structure mirrors your alias categories: one folder per category (Shopping, Social, Finance, Medical), with subfolders only where a category genuinely needs them.
⚙️ Directing Mail into Folders Automatically
The point of folders isn’t to file mail by hand; it’s to have mail file itself. Sieve filters run on our servers the moment mail arrives, whether you’re logged in or not:
- Go to Settings → Mail Delivery Filters.
- Create a filter per category: condition “To contains @shopping.example.com”, action “Move message to Shopping”.
- Add “Stop evaluating rules” as the final action.
Because every address you invent in a category ends in the same catch-all domain, one filter covers the entire category forever. Hand out newstore@shopping.example.com tomorrow and its mail lands in Shopping with no new rule.
You can route by anything else too: sender, subject, size, spam score. And the Whitelist delivers its matches directly to the folder you chose, bypassing everything else.
📥 Working with Folders Day to Day
- Drag and drop: Drag messages from the list onto any folder in the sidebar to move them. Select several first to move them together.
- Move to / Copy to: The message toolbar’s More menu offers the same thing by menu, handy on mobile.
- Archive button: One click moves the current message into your Archive, automatically divided by year, month, sender, or original folder (your choice in the archive settings).
- Unread counts: Every folder shows its unread count in the sidebar, so you can see at a glance where new mail landed.
- Threading is remembered per folder, so your Newsletters folder can be a flat list while Inbox stays threaded.
🔍 Searching Smarter
The search bar has a Scope setting that is the payoff for all this structure:
- Current folder: Search only the folder you’re in. With category folders this is usually all you need, and it’s the fastest, most precise search there is.
- This and subfolders: Search a whole branch, e.g. all of Finance including Taxes and Insurance beneath it.
- All folders: The full account, when you genuinely don’t know where something is.
Think of the folder as the first half of your query. “That dentist invoice from last spring” stops being a search across ten years of everything and becomes: open Medical, search invoice. Two clicks, a one-word search, and a result list where everything is already medical mail.
Searches can match subject, sender, recipients, or full message bodies, and combine with the list filters (unread, flagged, labels) for even tighter results.
⭐ Special Folders
Some folders have jobs. In Settings → Preferences → Special Folders you choose which folder serves each role:
- Drafts, Sent, Junk, Trash: Where unfinished mail, sent copies, suspected spam, and deleted mail go.
- Archive: The target of the Archive button, with its Divide archive by setting (year, month, sender, or original folder).
- Snoozed: Created automatically when you snooze a message; snoozed mail waits there until it returns to your inbox.
🏷️ Folders or Labels?
Folders and labels solve different problems, and they work best together:
- A message lives in exactly one folder. Folders answer “where is it?” and are the unit of scoped search.
- A message can carry many labels. Labels answer “what is it about?” across folders: an order confirmation in Shopping can also be labeled Warranty and To Do.
A good rule of thumb: structure by category with folders, then use labels for states and topics that cut across categories.
🚑 Need Help?
If you have questions about folders or run into anything unexpected, contact our support team at helpdesk@codamail.com.