[MlMt] Using Rules to trim a Smart mailbox

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 28 Feb 2015, at 16:40, Bart Lipman wrote:

> This is a bit of a tangent but somewhat related.  Is there any way to 
> set up a rule that compares the current date to the name of an IMAP 
> folder?

At least not easily. It would be possible to create a bundle command 
executed by a rule and this could use the virtual header `#source.path` 
to get the mailbox name, but I don't think that solves anything because 
the main issue here is how to trigger the rule itself.

> The idea:  Periodically, I have a slew of emails that I'll need to 
> deal with at some specific future date.  So I set up several different 
> IMAP folders, one for each such date, and name them by the date in 
> question.  If I could create a smart folder that recognizes that 
> today's date matches the name of the folder and brings those emails 
> in, that would be very useful.

The feature you are looking for is known under various names. My 
favorite is [Tickler File](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickler_file). 
I've written down various notes on how this could be implemented in 
MailMate, but I haven't decided on anything and I haven't implemented 
anything.

If you want to do something yourself using IMAP and smart mailboxes then 
you could make a system of relative dates. For example, create IMAP 
mailboxes, e.g, named like this:

	Postponed 1 day
	Postponed 1 week
	Postponed 1 month

For each of those, create a smart mailbox like this:

	Mailboxes: Postponed 1 day
	Condition: Date is not within 1 day
	Rule (no conditions): Move to Inbox

When postponing a message you would use ⌘T to move it to one of the 
“Postponed” mailboxes.

Caveats:

* When the message is moved back then it is sorted using its old date. 
If you have a large Inbox then it might be better to move it to a 
separate action-inbox.
* The above is assumed to work on the original date of the message. In 
other words, you cannot easily postpone a non-recent email. There is a 
virtual “last-viewed-date” date which could work if you never view 
postponed messages. I guess what you really need is a 
“last-moved-date”, but that is not available (yet).
* The IMAP mailboxes allow you to see what is postponed on other 
devices, but moving back requires MailMate. This is kind of unsolvable 
without some kind of server support for postponed messages.

-- 
Benny
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