[MlMt] The Auto-apply Rules Strike Back

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 23 Mar 2015, at 21:20, David O'Donnell wrote:

> The mailbox where the newsletter messages are moved has a type “ 
> ⒸⒶ” rule with the condition “All” are true: “Date is not 
> within last 10 days” and action of “Move to Mailbox” to Deleted 
> Messages.
>
> I’m sure I must be missing something obvious.

It's not obvious. Date-based conditions in rules like this are special, 
because they are never triggered. This is because rules are only checked 
when a message arrives in a mailbox. In this case, this happens before 
the date-condition is true.

The workaround is to make a smart mailbox with the date condition such 
that the message does arrive in a mailbox when it matches the date 
condition. The rule in this mailbox should then only have the “Move to 
Mailbox” action (without any conditions). A side-effect is that this 
smart mailbox is always empty.

Yeah, it's not very intuitive and I am of course considering how to 
improve this. It comes up relatively often.

-- 
Benny