I’ve been a FastMail user for a couple of years now. Since launching their desktop app recently, there’s little I’ve found wanting. Except this.
There are some classes of email that:
I want to receive
I want to retain
But not forever
That last point is what I’m trying to solve. The Fastmail rules are explicity for “email arriving” in my account. I can already catch these classes of email and send them out to a separate folder, but I am then left with a periodic manual task to search that folder with a date query (older than…) and delete the results.
Given Fastmail has standard IMAP access, I got to wondering if there are tools out there that could solve this for me? I wouldn’t even mind having to manually fire such purges, if they can be pre-defined. That would still save me going into Fastmail, into each folder, (remembering how to, and) executing the search, selecting all, then deleting.
I would want something I can trust 100% to do the right thing, so I’m looking for recommendations more than things you might have seen around but not used. Though I guess it can’t hurt to know about those and do some of my own research.
I’m not a fastmail user, and I usually make a decision on which messages to delete in the first few days. However, are you familiar with fastmail’s, auto-purge?
For work email in Outlook Classic, a lot of emails which come in are tagged by rules. Categories include 1 month, 3 months, 1 year, 3 years, 7 years and Keep.
I then have smart folders (per tag) which only show emails with each tag, sorted by date.
Once per month I open each Smart Folder one by one, and I delete anything older than the tag after today. E.g. the 3 years folder would be any email before 1st of Nov 2022 (I do it on or around the first of the month)
This is great for anything which I expect and tag by rule, or which I also tag manually.
I also have a search folder for emails over 200kb which aren’t tagged with any of the above and once a month I tag largest messages with a retention tag.
The above works well for the 15 minutes a month it takes and keeps my email fairly lean.
Oh, cool! No I was not aware of it. I will need to double check my folders, because I have different sources of email in the same place, but that’s a minor issue in light of fully automatic handling.