OS X Yosemite: The Missing Manual

VIPs

In the real world, VIPs are people who get backstage passes to concerts, or special treatment at business functions (it stands for “very important person”). In Yosemite, it means “somebody whose mail is important enough that I want it brought to my attention immediately when it arrives.”

So who should your VIPs be? That’s up to you. Your spouse, your boss, and your doctor come to mind.

To designate someone as a VIP, follow the steps shown in Figure 18-18. From now on, lots of interesting things happen:

• A new mailbox, called VIPs, appears in your mailboxes list. Click it to see all the mail from all your VIPs (even messages you’ve deleted). Or click the flippy triangle to see your VIPs’ names, each representing messages from that person.

• A new menu button appears on your Favorites toolbar called VIPs. Click to see all VIP messages, or click the to see a pop-up menu of all the VIPs’ names. Here again, the point is that you can jump to the messages from just that person.

• If you use iCloud, the same person is now a VIP on all your other Macs (running Mountain Lion or later), plus iPhones and iPads (running iOS 6 or later).

• Best of all, you can set up your Mac so that when a new message from a VIP comes in, an alert bubble appears in the top-right corner of your screen (Figure 18-18, bottom). That feature, of course, is part of the Notification Center, and it’s described in Chapter 10 ...