Mail rule driving me nuts (moving mail to designated folder after set amount of time)

[hewhore]

This rule is working, but only for one of the four mail accounts I have added to macOS Mail; iCloud, Gmail, Gmx, Posteo. Posteo is the one it's working on. I want all my Apple notices, which normally go to my iCloud account to remain in my inbox for 1 day before being moved to the Bin and eventually deleted. There were some Apple messages in the Posteo inbox, which got moved successfully, but the ones in the iCloud inbox won't budge.

Any ideas?

 

[BrianBaughn]

Is that the only rule you have that's not working?

 

[chabig]

Experiment a bit. Try From...contains, or From...is equal to...no_reply@email.apple.com

 

[NoBoMac]

What they said.

But that said, this might not work. Could not get something similar to work: all emails in this account > 30 days, delete.

I think the big problem is that the rules run automatically only on incoming/new emails. To have it run on existing mail(s), need to select it/them, then "Apply Rules".

Might be able to do something like this via an iOS Shortcut or AppleScript/Automator, but did not look into that.

How I handle this type of thing is to create a smart mailbox: all emails older than x days. Go to it, select all, delete.

 

[grahamwright1]

I think the big problem is that the rules run automatically only on incoming/new emails. To have it run on existing mail(s), need to select it/them, then "Apply Rules".

Totally correct! Rules are only automatically processed for new unread mails. Would be nice if they could be configured to process ALL mails

 

[hewhore]

Is that the only rule you have that's not working?

No it's not. The other one, which is actually more of a problem, is that with any rule, when I set the "If all/any of the following conditions are met:" to 'any', regardless of the actions in the rule (I just tried one that changes the colour of all messages from one email address), it moves every email to the Posteo trash, regardless of who it's from.

 

[hewhore]

How I handle this type of thing is to create a smart mailbox: all emails older than x days. Go to it, select all, delete.

Yeah Smart Mailboxes are less hassle, it's just that these "bugs" with Rules in Mac Mail have existed for as long as I can remember, going back to Leopard, it's annoying af that Apple still haven't managed to fix them.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Yeah Smart Mailboxes are less hassle, it's just that these "bugs" with Rules in Mac Mail have existed for as long as I can remember, going back to Leopard, it's annoying af that Apple still haven't managed to fix them.

macOS Mail rules on incoming mail are just about meaningless these days with multiple devices connecting.

 

[viggen61]

Sounds like the difference between POP mail and IMAP mail.

POP mail is almost always downloaded into the MacOS Mail app, and can use the "catch-all" folder for Trash (Bin, I presume in your case) that is in MacOS Mail.

IMAP mail is intended to stay on the server, which is how you can see your mail on multiple devices, and they all are in sync. In the case of IMAP mail, each account has a dedicated Trash folder. So, for a message received in iCloud, it has to be put in the iCloud Trash folder.

I believe iCloud can only be IMAP. You'd need to check each of the others.

You may need to set up separate rules for each email system you use.