Self-destructing email?

December 7, 2010 10:11 PM

Email Filter of my Dreams? I get daily emails from some websites like Groupon and Mint that are only useful for one day or one week, is there anyway that I can set my gmail account to automatically delete or at least filter these messages after a specific time period (ie 24 hours)? If I set up a regular filter then these messages skip my BlackBerry inbox. Halp me?
posted by saradarlin to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

I don't know if there's a good way to do this. I hope someone has a better answer, but I would label them all coming in, and every so often go into that label and delete everything. Not the most elegant workaround... but a workaround nonetheless...
posted by brainmouse at 10:47 PM on December 7, 2010

I would not expect them to skip your Blackberry inbox if the Gmail filter simply labels them without also archiving them.
posted by flabdablet at 10:52 PM on December 7, 2010

I'm not aware of a straightforward way to do this, but your suggestion would be welcome at the Gmail feature request site. I get daemon-generated emails every few hours, and while they skip my inbox, I would love it if they'd get automatically deleted after a 24h or so expiration period.

That being said, pretty much all of email, with a few exceptions, is time-sensitive. It's not that difficult to open the email (presumably you subscribed for a reason), and click "Archive".
posted by halogen at 10:53 PM on December 7, 2010

So if you create a filter that labels all these messages "expiring", then every now and again you can click "expiring" in your labels list, then check the box at the top of the checkboxes column to select all expiring messages, then click the first message's checkbox to unselect it, then shift-click the checkbox on the last message that's still less than a week old to unselect all this week's messages, then click Delete to kill anything that remains selected.

It's not fully automatic but neither is it unreasonably slow.
posted by flabdablet at 11:05 PM on December 7, 2010

Response by poster: I should clarify that by filter I mean gmail speak of "label and archive" automatically since I mostly use the BB for email I was hoping to find a work around to avoid doing this manually in my inbox.
posted by saradarlin at 11:28 PM on December 7, 2010

Can you persuade the Blackberry to connect to your Gmail account via IMAP rather than POP3? Because that should get you access to all your Gmail labels as Blackberry folders, and let you do your filtering on the Blackberry side instead of using the Gmail web interface to set them up.
posted by flabdablet at 11:41 PM on December 7, 2010

Here are Gmail IMAP instructions for Blackberry, and you might also want to try out the Gmail mobile app.
posted by flabdablet at 11:43 PM on December 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

I use Syphir for this. It accesses your Gmail account via Oauth, so it's fairly secure and they never see your password. It allows you to set filters based on time, among other things. For example, I use it to automatically delete the "We're sending you..." emails from Netflix after a day. It can also archive, sort into folders, etc. It should do what you want and is pretty simple to set up.
posted by crosbyh at 10:36 AM on December 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

I woke up in the middle of the night and thought of something that might work: What if you have a filter that deletes them, but also forwards them to your Blackberry's email (the provider.blackberry.net account). That way they're gone from Gmail, but you can also see them to check Groupon or whatever.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 2:28 PM on December 8, 2010

Response by poster: I can set up lables on my BB but is seems nothing gets me out of deleting these emails manually at the end of the day either from my phone or gmail. Sad panda.
posted by saradarlin at 8:33 PM on December 8, 2010