Three simple identical smart groups, one doesn't show content count or the content

I have searched and found other topics about missing smart group content counts, but they seem to be related to complex smart group criteria. Today, I noticed that I had two “Unread” smart groups and only one had a count next to it. No editing of its criteria would make it show items that are “marked as unread,” however I could switch to “marked as read” and bam, items would show up and so would the count. So I created a third identical smart group to show “marked as unread” and it works as expected :confused:

So, I’m sure there is something else behind the scenes causing an issue, or possibly a small bug somewhere related to read/unread that may be lingering within smart groups.

Screenshot 2022-12-18 at 6.28.39 PM



Happy to share whatever I can to reveal the problem. Gonna run through and check all my other database’s unread smart groups.

Thanks,
Brock

Could you please export all 3 smart groups via File > Export > Files & Folders… and send the exported files (including the DEVONtech_Storage file) to cgrunenberg - at - devon-technologies.com? Thanks in advance!

Sent :slight_smile:

You’ll see this when you examine the DEVONtech_storage plist, but it looks like that particular smart group has an extra “reverse” entry and a “sort” value that’s different than the other two.

Brock

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So to clarify my problem for others, it turns out to be a stupid user error that results from the way that the item contents of unified Inboxes can be displayed.

A smart group belongs to a single database, but if you have several smart groups with the same name within your inboxes and you select the “Inboxes” entry under “Globals” in the navigate sidebar, the contents of all the unified inboxes will be aggregated and the smart groups may appear together in the neighboring pane, depending on your sorting.

So here’s the stupid user part… I wanted a single smart group to show the unread items for all inboxes, so I right-clicked on “Inboxes” and made a new smart group with “Database” as the “search in” criteria, expecting it to search all of the “Inboxes” databases, but that’s not what happens :confused: The smart group gets created within the global “Inbox”, and its search is performed only within that database. So I had several “Unread” smart groups from multiple database inboxes listed next to what I thought was an “Unread” smart group for all the “Inboxes” (actually multiple because I created multiple when not getting the results I expected), and they were showing different contents due to the databases in which they were actually contained. When examining the criteria of each smart group from that aggregated listing, all the criteria appear to be the same but the contents were different, hence the confusion.

Hope this helps someone else that might run into this.

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