Smart Suggestions

Smart Suggestions analyzes your past filing activity and automatically suggests the most likely mailbox or mailboxes where your selected message(s) belong. The suggested mailboxes are generated entirely on your Mac — no data ever leaves your computer.

How does it work?

Every time you file a message, MsgFiler records a small piece of training data: the subject, sender, original account, and the mailbox you filed it into. Over time, this builds a history of your filing patterns.

When you select a new message, MsgFiler:

1. Breaks down the subject and sender (or recipient if filing a sent message) into tokens (for example, “invoice,” “amazon,” or the sender’s domain).

2. Looks up how often those tokens have appeared in your past training data for each mailbox.

3. Calculates probabilities using a lightweight statistical model that evaluates how likely each mailbox is based on your past filing patterns, with safeguards so that new or rare words don’t throw off the results.

4. Normalizes the scores into probabilities so they add up to 100%.

5. Suggests the top mailboxes if their confidence scores are high enough.

The more you file, the better the system becomes at recognizing patterns (e.g. “anything with ‘Amazon’ usually goes to Orders”). If predictions fall below a confidence threshold, MsgFiler won’t suggest anything — so you’re never shown low-quality guesses.

If the number of selected messages is greater than 10, five messages will be chosen at random to act as training data for Smart Suggestions. This is to balance speed of logging and evaluation.

Where do suggestions appear?

When the search field in MsgFiler is empty, you’ll see up to five suggested mailboxes at the top of the mailbox list, above Favorites and Recents.

• If Smart Suggestions is confident, these mailboxes should match where you’d likely file the selected message.

• You can still type in the search field, use Favorites, or browse your full mailbox list as before.

• You can customize how the suggested mailbox looks in the list of results. See Advanced settings for more details.

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How do I enable it?

1. Go to Settings > Search.

2. Turn on Suggest mailboxes automatically.

3. While in MsgFiler, you can also press Shift-Command-S to toggle Smart Suggestions.

Can I see or reset what’s been logged?

Yes.

• In Settings > Filing, click View Smart Suggestions Log to see what data is stored.

• You can also choose Reset Smart Suggestions to erase the log and reset the classifier if you’d like to start fresh.

Smart Suggestion logs are local to your Mac. They are never uploaded or shared.

Training without filing

You can train Smart Suggestions without filing by clicking the Train button or pressing Shift-Command-T on your keyboard. Make sure you have selected the mailbox in which you want to train the selected messages on.

For instance, to bulk train several messages, perform the following in MsgFiler when Smart Suggestions is enabled.

1. Open a mailbox that contains already-filed messages you wish to train on.

2. Select several messages. Recommendation is less than 10.

3. Invoke MsgFiler.

4. Type out the name of the mailbox you are looking at in Mail.

5. Click Train.

6. Repeat steps 1-5 on additional mailboxes and messages.

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Tips and Tricks

• Suggestions will improve the more you file — don’t expect them to be perfect right away.

• Filing into the wrong mailbox will also train the system, so if you notice repeated mistakes, use Reset Smart Suggestions and retrain by filing correctly. You can also edit the Suggestions Log in the text editor of your choice, but you will have to quit and restart MsgFiler for the training data to be processed again.

• Logging adds a small amount of overhead during filing, but you can disable the Suggest mailboxes automaticallysetting in Settings > Search if you’d like to speed things up.