bob.m.
Level 1 (4 points)
Notebooks

Q: Rules for deleting email messages

13-inch MacBook Air (late 2010) 

OS X 10.9.5 (13F1911)

Mail Version 7.3 (1878.6)

 

I have set up the following Rule for each of my Gmail accounts:   when any message is 183 or more days old, delete it.

However, no messages have ever been deleted by this rule;  so I now have several thousand undeleted messages sitting in my incoming mailboxes.

How do I get these rules to work as intended?

MacBook Air (13-inch Late 2010), Mac OS X (10.6.8), Apple Mail 4.5

Posted on Oct 4, 2016 7:19 AM

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bob.m.

Q: Rules for deleting email messages

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  • Helpful answers

  • by becky_s22,

    becky_s22 becky_s22 Oct 5, 2016 10:37 AM in response to bob.m.
    Community Specialists
    Oct 5, 2016 10:37 AM in response to bob.m.

    Hi bob.m.,

     

    Welcome to the Apple Support Communities!

     

    We understand from your post that Mail rules aren’t working the way you would expect. Mail rules are definitely helpful with managing your accounts; we’re happy to take a look at this situation with you. 

     

    Do you have multiple rules set up that may be interfering with each other? Are any of these messages being transferred to a different mailbox that has different rules applied to it?

     

    To begin troubleshooting this situation, if you have not already, we suggest deleting this rule and setting it up again. From your post, we see that you are running Mac OS X 10.9, but the following article was written Mac OS X 10.10. This information and these steps still may be useful to you when setting up the rules again. 

     

    Mail (Yosemite): Use rules to manage your inbox

     

    Cheers!

  • by bob.m.,

    bob.m. bob.m. Oct 6, 2016 5:05 PM in response to becky_s22
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Notebooks
    Oct 6, 2016 5:05 PM in response to becky_s22

    Thanks for your reply, Becky. 

    Believe it or not, I found the solution on my own. 

  • by dwb,

    dwb dwb Oct 7, 2016 4:16 AM in response to bob.m.
    Level 7 (24,477 points)
    Notebooks
    Oct 7, 2016 4:16 AM in response to bob.m.

    For curiosity sake and for those who might have similar problems, it would be nice if you'd describe your solution.

  • by bob.m.,

    bob.m. bob.m. Oct 7, 2016 7:48 PM in response to dwb
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Notebooks
    Oct 7, 2016 7:48 PM in response to dwb

    What's curious is that my description of the solution did not come thru with the rest of my reply to Becky.    Here it is in a nutshell:     it's not enough just to establish a rule for deleting messages .... to make your rule work, you then have to open the "Messages" drop-down menu and go down near the bottom of this menu and click "Apply Rule".   Simple enough, but I've done alot of searching thru the Mail application but never come across any such instruction.