In short

I am trying to create a shortcut in Mail similar to one I have created to the Archive folder. However, using System Preferences’ Keyboard pane I have been unsuccessful in creating shortcuts to iCloud Mailboxes. I have four folders called, ‘Next Actions’ ‘Someday’ ‘To Read’ and ‘Waiting’ in my iCloud Mail account which I can drag and drop to in Mail. I cannot get the keyboard shortcuts to work though. Please can you help? Jim Waddell Christian Hall says By creating shortcuts to a mailbox, do you mean those you create by dragging a folder from full list of mailboxes to the Favorites Bar (under the toolbar)? You don’t need to manually assign shortcuts in the Keyboard preferences pane to work with those, because Mail will automatically assign two keyboard shortcuts to each mailbox you drag into that bar – at least, it does for the first nine mailboxes from left to right.

Pressing ≈+ç and the number key that matches a mailbox’s position in the bar (starting from 1 at the left, which is your inbox by default) will move the selected messages to that mailbox. Pressing ç and a number displays the corresponding mailbox.

If keyboard shortcuts, including those provided by the system or an app, aren’t working for you, have you checked that no other utility you’ve installed, such as those in the menu bar that you might want to access at any time, is using the same ones?