[MlMt] rule for deleting messages

[Bill Cole]

On 20 Aug 2017, at 13:39, Tim Lance wrote:

> I want to delete messages older than 30 days. Yes, I understand the 
> implications but I am not a huge email user.
>
> Best I can tell is I need to set a rule? I tried setting one for the 
> “combined” mailbox: Deleted Messages. It does not work. I have 6 
> IMAP accounts (5 gmail, 1 iCloud). I tried setting a rule for a 
> particular mailbox in Deleted Messages. Nope.


I've done something like this for abandoned Drafts over 30 days old. I 
have a smart mailbox inside Drafts called DraftAbbatoir, that contains 
anything in the aggregated Drafts mailbox which is over 30 days old. 
That smart mailbox has a rule which does a sanity check (i.e. that 
\Flagged and \Forwarded aren't set but \Draft is) and permanently 
deletes anything which passes.

This works because rules are only automatically run against a message 
when it first appears in a mailbox. In my rig, messages appear in the 
mailbox when they are 30 days old. If you have a rule set on Deleted 
Messages, any message you delete in the usual way (provisionally) has 
the rule tested against it at that time but never again unless you 
select the message specifically and use the Apply Rules menu command.