The Problem
Like most folks I get a bunch of notification emails that are useful, but generally only for a limited amount of time. For instance, I get the USPS Informed Delivery emails daily about what is in my mailbox. These are useful for a day or two, but I don’t care for them after then. I’d generally like them to be trashed after that.
Proposed Solution
My thoughts are that an additional type of rule could be added to the mail filters. For instance “Older than: One week” which would then apply the rule. It isn’t an automatic solution, but provides the feature to power users.
Alternative Solutions
- Many mail clients (i.e. GMail) are going to try and auto-classify emails into groups. It would be interesting to have a group of emails and be able to set policies for that group. This is clearly more complex as the group is non-trivial. But if the grouping could be made simple, it would be probably a feature that could elevate to being usable by a more general audience.
- Provide a delayed delete feature while browsing email. For instance, Shift+Delete, which would delete the email in a specified number of days. Feels hidden to me, but perhaps it could be surfaced in a more intuitive way.
(Originally posted by ted-gould on GitHub.)