In workplaces like mine, you’d need something more than just ‘n’, because we get broadcast messages that we’re all supposed to read. Email filters need to be very, very complex. If it took me 1/2 a day to set up my filters, it wouldn’t matter if it saved me that much time every week. One thing that would help would be being able to define groups - if an email is addressed to me and two or more members of any other group I’m in, I want to see it, etc.

Only thing I can think of is an Applescript that fires for every single email, and then counts the recipients. It would certainly work, but might be aggravatingly slow…

doing what you really want to do assumes that you are able to expand mail aliases on the client, which is not possible. for example, if someone sends a tired and offensive sexist joke to 100 people in your department via widgetdepartment-all@acme.com, that shows up as one recipient. if your boss sends you and your cubicle-mate a schedule change notification, that shows up as two recipients.

It would be great if you could publish the thanks.no in other languages (well, I’m thinking in spanish)…

Best regards from Santiago, Chile

//jorge

For the workplace, one solution would be a combination of ‘n’ and a white list. The white list would have to be maintained by corporate. If the number of recepients exceeds the value of ‘n’ but the address is in the approved white list, then it would automatically be accepted. This would block the the simple “Hey this is funny list”.

But it would not stop the people who use the bcc function to hide the recepients.

Sounds like an idea worth allowing the Mail engineers to ponder. The best way to make that happen is to file a bug report requesting this as an enhancement! http://bugreport.apple.com/

Have to agree with the concerns listed above regarding BCC and distribution lists. I have been begging family and friends to put recipient names in the BCC field for years to protect email privacy. It would be tough for me to ask them to stop now so that I could write a script to count recipients. You would be better off to use the subject line and use positive filtering instead. Where subject line contains sort to read sooner. You would need to agree with clients and co-workers to use keywords in your subject line. I can’t wait to see the advent of Tags for email that are actually part of the message.

I do something like this Entourage via a Group called “Me” that has all of my e-mail addresses in it. Then you create an incoming rule with: if “only recipient” “is not in group” “Me.” Then simply have the “Then” portion either “Move Message” to your filter folder or “Set Category” to a filter category. I prefer the later, sorting my Inbox by Category with a “.to me” category at the top of the sort.

I also have a group called “Notifiers” that contains e-mail addresses of high priority people. You can use the same “not in group” trick to make sure the annoying new mail notification doesn’t display unless the incoming e-mail is from someone in the “Notifiers” group. It’s a if “from” “is not in group” “Notifiers” then “Do Not Notify.”

Sorry, but no clue how to do it in Mail.

Two thoughts:

1) Just because recipients are in bcc: doesn’t mean they’re invisible to a script necessarily - different implementations vary - plus, an e-mail client or server could compute ‘n’ and put it in an X-header; won’t solve your problem right now but it’s a possible suggestion for future e-mail developers.

2) This sounds like e-mail needs “plug-ins” on the input side of things. I don’t know about Mail.app, not being a Mac person, but I know it would be useful on other platforms I use. Filters are close, but don’t provide enough kinds of logic.

Slightly related, but I had the same issue at a job once where the secretary sent out the most foul, inappropriate emails to dozens of people both in and out of the company. The problem, though, was that she also occasionally sent out important stuff so I couldn’t just filter her right out.

I ended up filtering on a friend of her’s that was part of the distribution list which solved the problem. No one likes to read jokes about anuses first thing on a Monday morning.

More on topic: applescript would seem to be the fastest way to accomplish this, but as someone else already said it would probably be very slow.

Well, I would suggest using POPfile (http://popfile.sourceforge.net/) which is a bayesian filter. The nice thing abut POPfile is (1) that it is independent of your mail client, because it is a mail proxy, (2) it works for as many different topics as you like, meaning it is not a spam filter, but a general filter that filters everything you want.

I have it set up to automatically filter my mail into work (and here into two different companies I run), personal, sparetime (newsletters, etc.) and spam. But I am sure it could recognize mails that are important for you (no matter what the number of TO: people is).

It of course needs a bit of training, like all automatic filter solutions, but the error rate get low very quickly. On my home machine I reached a 90% success rate after two days, which is not too bad.

Hi, I just found this site as I’m learning about GTD. If you are using unix, you could probably do it using the Procmail mail filtering tool. If you search “procmailex man page” you can see examples of what the Procmail can do. I would think you could write a regular expression to match when the the TO: field has at least N emails addresses in it.

The current version of Lotus Notes actually does this. Mails are flagged with an icon depending upon who it is addressed to. A black circle means its addressed to over 5 people, half black and white means to less than 5 and a white circle means its just addressed to you.

We use an Outbound Barracuda and have implemented a rule that will BLOCK any attempt to send out a message that has more than n (we’re still playing with the number, but around 10) addresses in either the TO or the CC line. We can’t control what other people do, but at least we can prevent ourselves from adding to the problem.

@Al

You mean Lotus actually did something intuitive with the latest version of Notes… Now that… different.

And for the recond, yes, I do use Notes at work. On a Mac. Which means I have to wait until September for Notes 7.

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