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I have a ton of filters created that label e-mails in my inbox as they come in, so that I can easily discern between what groups they belong to with a quick glimpse. There are e-mails that get nested under, e.g. LABEL, and these are e-mails I read once and then archive, or sometimes just mark as read and archive (the subject line sometimes is enough to know what's going on inside it). However, after a week or so, the messages labelled LABEL are no longer of interest to me, and I delete them to prevent piling up of read and archived useless messages/e-mails.

What I want to know, is if there is some automatic way to get this latter part accomplished, since I now need to delete e-mails older than 7 days nested under LABEL manually. I know I can use filters to, in addition to adding a label to them as they come in, also delete or archive the e-mails. But that's not what I want; I want to be able to accomplish something like this:

  1. E-mail comes in, filter acts upon it, and I see it labelled as LABEL as it drops into my inbox. This part is why a filter (as far as I could tell) is of no use for what I want, since I don't want the e-mail to skip the inbox;
  2. I either read it or mark it as read, and then manually archive it;
  3. It goes away from my inbox, but I can still access it through search, All Mail or LABEL;
  4. It gets deleted 7 days afterwards, automatically.

Is there anyway to accomplish this? Either via the tools GMail has by default, or by some other means?

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    Not possible with just Gmail; filters only act on messages as they come in. You'll need some sort of 3rd party tool.
    – ale
    May 11, 2015 at 0:18
  • Ok, so it would fall under the "by some other means" category. Do you know anything in particular that could be of help here? Scripts, apps, tools?
    – JNat ♦
    May 11, 2015 at 0:52
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    A time-triggered script is the way to do it; if the script posted by aparente001 didn't already exist, I'd write something like that (with the change I indicated under the answer).
    – user79865
    May 31, 2015 at 2:06

1 Answer 1

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Here's a script that is supposed to auto-purge older email messages: http://www.labnol.org/internet/gmail-auto-purge/27605/ I haven't tried it.

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    Tried this; it works. I only changed the deprecated method ScriptApp.getScriptTriggers() to ScriptApp.getProjectTriggers(). Also, I'd avoid using spaces in labels associated with this script [or at all] because Gmail changes spaces to hyphens in some places.
    – user79865
    May 31, 2015 at 2:05
  • @Idisagree Should all instances of getScript[something] be replaced with getProject[something]? (example: Session.getScriptTimeZone())
    – JNat ♦
    Jun 22, 2015 at 21:28
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    @JNat No, that one is fine. Google's naming decisions are what they are... The idea seems to be that triggers are grouped by a project (which may involve several scripts), while Session.getScriptTimeZone() is something that refers to the specific script being executed right now.
    – user79865
    Jun 22, 2015 at 21:40
  • I used this with the changes @1999 left in the comments.
    – JNat ♦
    Jun 25, 2015 at 8:50

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