Apple Mail | Rules – A List?

Apple offers nothing other than Use rules to manage emails you receive in Mail on Mac - Apple Support. That is all there is. I wish there were a more comprehensive guide and yes I have looked.

Documentation has never been an overwhelming priority for Apple. I surmise one reason is their desire for various interdepartmental secrecy. Besides being a cost center, given the perpetual changes to macOS, maintaining concurrent documentation would be practically impossible to accomplish.

Scripting makes Mail Rules especially versatile: Use scripts as rule actions in Mail on Mac - Apple Support, but that document is similarly short on detail. Apple once had a talented individual in charge of scripting but he departed long ago leaving the scripting endeavor rudderless. In short if iOS doesn't do it, neither will macOS, which is probably the reason he left.

Are you talking about Mail rules (the third last tab in Mail settings) or macros (I assume you mean scripts?) or Shortcuts?

What panel? If you're talking about the Rules panel then the list of actions which you can perform are all in the drop-down. They look pretty self explanatory to me but if you tell us which ones you don't understand then help might be forthcoming. If you're talking about the script dictionary then you'll have to wait for someone more knowledgable than me - I've never scripted mail.

Alternatively, it might be easier telling us what you want to do rather than a vague complaint about how you couldn't do something that you haven't explained.

"Despite years of usage, I have many questions about Apple Mail."

Maybe, but you don't seem to want to ask them, which is curious, but it takes all sorts.

To answer one of them I've never seen a detailed and complete explanation of what the rules do - but then I haven't looked for them because I find them all self explanatory or easily testable and I've never had any problems using them. I can't see what's hard to understand about a rule called "move message to mail box:" or "Stop evaluating rules". It would only take four words to describe the latter; "It stops evaluating rules.".

I've offered to help you with individual rules you don't understand but it seems that you don't want my help, or indeed any help unless it's a reference some sort of formal guide written by an Apple employee. The whole tone of your posts implies that you are more keen on a soapbox to bang out your opinions on Apple's support documentation rather than actually getting any help. Reminds me of a fable read to us at school about the man who couldn't eat his soup cos there was no spoon but he wouldn't ask for a spoon - just kept saying "I can't eat this soup" to the waiter until his soup went cold.

Which ones don't you understand?