[MlMt] rule for deleting messages

[Verdon Vaillancourt]

One of the mailboxes I subscribe too is a gmail account. It gets a lot 
of noise from a couple servers I admin, which I do not need to keep 
beyond 30 days. I user gmail filters to move mail with certain criteria 
to a gmail folder, and a script within google apps that works on that 
folder as a cron sort of thing, and nightly deletes anything older than 
30 days. It could work directly on the inbox too, if I wanted it to.

The point is, is that sort of action works best on the server, and not 
on the client, where rules general only run once on inbound mail, 
without manual intervention. gmail is scriptable, and that’s handy. 
Other servers may have other choices. Thinking out loud now too, would 
it be possible with Applescript to have a task run in MlMt that would 
manually run rules on all the contents of select mailboxes?

v


On 21 Aug 2017, at 7:07, Tim Lance wrote:

> Thanks, Bill. I’ll keep messing with this. I wonder what others do.
>
> tim
>
>
> On 20 Aug 2017, at 18:19, Bill Cole wrote:
>
>> 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.
>> _______________________________________________