Create a rule to delete older messages in a folder

I'm finding housekeeping in my Mac Mail time consuming and wanted to create a rule for a particular folder to delete messages older than say 2 weeks. I've tried googling and looking around for help but I can't find much.
I also have another issues I have a iMac and a Macbook pro and find I have to manage 2 inboxes, how does everyone else do this if I have read a message on my macbook pro why do I then have to see it as unread on my iMac. My machines are setup for syncing and I have a mobile me account? This should be so much easier. Am hoping iCloud might solve this, I only want to read an e-mail once.
I'm now on Lion, any help or advice would really be appreciated.
Thanks
Catherine

Rules apply automatically only to new, incoming messages. It is easy enough to make a rule to delete old messages, but you would have to run it manually. (To create a rule, go to the Rules pane in Mail Preferences. The process is pretty self-explanatory, and much easier to do than to explain.)
Your Inbox behavior is exactly the way a POP account works — your email program simply downloads messages from the server. The server has no idea which messages you have or have not read. If your mail service provides IMAP, that is what you want. Set up an IMAP account, if you can, and deactivate the POP account. Not all email providers include IMAP, however.

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How can I set up a rule to delete all messages older than 6 months left in Apple Mail's main inbox?

How can I set up a rule to delete all messages older than 6 months left in Apple Mail's main inbox?
I have created other rules to move some of my daily messages into specific folders and I don't wish to auto-delete those.
Just the general stuff that keeps piling up in my me.com main email box. Mail such as FB announcements and other low priority stuff I want to look at before deleting but don't want to keep longer than a week or month.
TIA
thokitts

Thanks, but I am looking for a more automated solution than hand marking emails as junk. I might as well move them to the trash myself.
Again, these are emails I want to receive and quickly read, but not keep longer than a week or month or so. By setting a rule to toss any older than 30 days back then my Mail program (and thus my hard drive) won't be wasting so much space. For example, currently I have over 6000 read messages, with their attachments, in my main email box. I'd rather not have to physically attend to sorting the one I don't want out.
The one I do keep for other reasons get moved into other folders.
It seems this should be possible.
thokitts

How do I create a rule to delete old unread email?

I thought this would be easy to set up, but I can't find the right parameters in the Rules setting of Mail. I want to create a rule that deletes emails that remain unread after a period of time like 3-6 months. Can someone tell me how to set this up? Do I need to set it up separately for each email account? Thanks!

After deleting from a smart mailbox you need to use the Mailbox ➙ Erase Deleted Items menu option:

Can I set up a rule to delete email messages based on age?

Can I set up a rule that automatically deletes email messages that are say 3 mos old?

In mail perferences, under rules, click add rule, then click on 'add recipient' and you'll have a menu of options. Pick date reeceived, in the next box choose 'is greater than' and in the next box however many days. Then under perform this action you can choose to delete the message or move it to another mailbox.
After defining that rule, it will automagically delete messages that meet that criteria.

Can't delete the messages in Junk folder like before

Hi,
I used to be able to right click on the Junk folder in Mail and select Delete Junk messages.
This option is no longer available. Delete messages in Trash is still available but this is not what I want to do.
In the Tool bar under Messages, this option can be seen but can not be used as this menu option is not in a darker font colour.
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Check your Preference settings under Junk. If you're set to perform Custom Actions, then this will happen. I recently made that change and encountered the same. Now if only Apple will fix whatever they've screwed up so that my junk filtering will become useful again...

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This has bugged me for years. I keep waiting for it to be fixed in the next update of Apple Mail, but it never is!
Is there a way to apply a rule to a certain mailbox? For instance, I have a mailbox (folder) that all of my newsletters get automatically thrown into, and I'd like the older ones to be deleted as the new ones come in. The problem is, there is no way (that I know of) that allows me to apply a rule to this mailbox.
Years ago I had no trouble achieving this function with OutlookExpress. IF MESSAGE IN MAILBOX XXX IS OLDER THAN XXX THEN DELETE. Why is Apple Mail missing this feature? Frustrating. Possibly this has been fixed in Leopard/Mail but I wouldn't know, I'm stuck with Tiger for a while because my g4 won't play nice with Leopard... I'm using Mail 2.1.3

Mail's rules only apply to incoming messages. You can create such a rule but it will not run automatically. You would need to select the all the messages in that mailbox then select Apply Rules from the Messages menu. Alternatively you can create a Smart Mailbox that's configured to contain messages older than a set criterion. Periodically delete the contents of the Smart Mailbox.
You could purchase Microsoft Office in order to use Entourage instead of Mail, Address Book, and iCal. Entourage has additional rules programming.
"Why is Mail missing this feature?" Perhaps because it isn't very much needed. Perhaps to give you a reason to ask the question. Or maybe just to aggravate those who feel they cannot live without it. Best you email Steve Jobs for an answer. It has not changed in Leopard.
You can always submit a feature request at Feedback.
Or, you can return to OS 9 or Windows where you can use Outlook Express.

How do I create a rule in mail that only applies to flagged messages?

I would like to create a rule in mail that would delete messages of a certain age, but I need to keep some messages safe. I would like to be able to flag these or put them in a mailbox and have a rule making messages with those flags or mailboxes safe from being deleted. Is that something I can do? Thanks!

You can create a local mailbox and move the messages you want to keep there. I don't see any kind to rule you can make to move a flagged message, so you would probably have to do it manually, unless you can use other criteria to identify messages you wish to keep.
If you're using the server settings in mail to determine the age before deletion, the local mailboxes would be safe from that deletion. You can set to store messages on server for up to 30 days before deletion. This will work for IMAP accounts, but don't apply to the inbox. Just to the other main mailboxes such as Sent, Trash, etc.
If you create a rule to delete messages after a certain age (outside of what the servers would do automatically), I think it would only work on the inbox if at all, but not sure. If it were applied through all, it would delete them from the local folders also.
You can create a smart mailbox and input certain criteria such as flagged, age. You could exclude any mailbox that you don't want to include, such as local folders, by adding that to part of the criteria. You would have to delete the messages manually as they accumulate. This would be useful when you save a lot of mail, but say you only want to keep messages less than a year old. This would help you instantly see messages that meet your deletion criteria without having to manually check messages for age.

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I used to be able to edit and delete older messages - up to a week old or so - but with recent update I noticed that I cannot do either after one hour or so. I use Windows 7. What happened to Skype? I prefer being able to edit older messages ...

Why no responses?!
I can't believe nobody even wonders about this issue!

Rule to Delete mail from a particular Mailbox

I have a rule set up that moves mail to a certain mailbox. I would like to make a rule that deletes the messages out of that mailbox (and only that mailbox) once a week.
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No. You were my only response and I couldn't find an answer anywhere. Maybe now that there's been new activity on this post, someone with an answer will notice it. Here's hoping!

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Hello,
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if the mailbox is enabled the single item recovery, then the messages would move from deletion folder to the purges folder After running the following script,
Search-Mailbox dave -searchdumpsteronly
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Please click the Mark as Answer button if a post solves your problem!

Thank you all,
As the mailbox is enabled single item recovery.
I just want to make the items neither in deletion folder, nor in purges folder.
So I think there are two ways to achieve this.
Method 1,disabled the single item recovery. then delete the items in deletion folder ,so it wouldn't enter to the purges folder, it just deleted permanently. then enable the single item recovery
Method 2,delete the items in deletion folder,then the messages move to the purges folder, then delete the messages in purges folder.
the Method 1 is not so good ,as it need to disable the single item recovery firstly, then enable single item recovery .
So I want to use the Method 2
Please click the Mark as Answer button if a post solves your problem!

Can't delete email messages from some folders in Mail

I CAN delete email messages from header Folder "MAILBOXES" (drafts, sent, trash); however, there's another folder header below called "ON MY MAC", where I save various emails by dragging them to a subfolder, and when I try to delete these, I get this message:
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Colin,
Have you checked Mail>Window>Previous Recipients for the old address? If not, attempt to "Remove From List" at that location and let us know what happens.
;~)

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I was hoping to get a powershell script that would do the following
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I did some searching, I have found very useful things like how to empty a deleted items folder. I can even display all messages in that folder using this script snippet. But whenever I try to filter it down to email older than 3 days old, it blows up on me. I was attempting to use a | Where-Object pipe to reduce it and there are thousands of messages in that folder.
$outlook = New-Object -ComObject Outlook.Application
$olFolderInbox=6
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$f = $n.GetDefaultFolder($olFolderInbox)
$mailbox = $n.Folders.Item($f.Parent.Name)
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$folder.Items
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I thought I might offer another solution for this. I came across this post looking to do the same, but I found it didn't always delete messages. Based on some other information on another site I was able to come up with a modified version.
The two other sites I referenced were:
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/ScriptCenter/en-us/966637b9-0b70-41c0-99d0-4647a89da70a
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb220369%28office.12%29.aspx
----Script----
#Name of folder to access. You can specify subfolders by using FolderName\Subfolder
$folderPath = "FolderName"
#Filter older than 7 days
$olderThan = (get-date).AddDays(-7)
#Set format of date to use
$dateFormat = "g" # This will base on time to do just date choose "M/dd/yyyy"
#Create filter
$sFilter = "[LastModificationTime] < `'$($olderThan.tostring($dateFormat))`'"
$outlook = New-Object -ComObject Outlook.Application
$olFolderInbox=6
$n = $outlook.GetNamespace("MAPI")
$f = $n.GetDefaultFolder($olFolderInbox)
$mailbox = $n.Folders.Item($f.Parent.Name)
$folders = $mailbox.Folders
#Navigate to the proper folder
foreach ($folderName in $folderPath.split("\"))
$folder = $folders.Item($folderName)
$folders = $folder.Folders
$Items=$folder.items
$FilteredItems = $Items.Restrict($sFilter)
for ($i = $FilteredItems.Count; $i -gt 0; $i--) {
Write-Host "Deleting $($FilteredItems.Item($i).Subject)"
$FilteredItems.Item($i).Delete()
#Clean out any open connections
$outlook = $n = $f = $mailbox = $folder = $folders = $Items = $FilteredItems = $null;

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Hi,
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ok,
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In this URL
http://docs.sun.com/source/816-6738-10/store.html#wp999497
are samples that use * and not %
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Create a rule to delete older messages in a folder

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