Posts in ‘Collective Intelligence’
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Question: Is it possible to have GMail do time based tasks on sets of e-mail?
From August 01, 2008 @ 6:00 am
Problem
I’m subscribed to a bunch of e-mail lists and other notifications of the sort that has come to be known as Bacn. There have been plenty of lively discussions about the problem of bacn and how to properly deal with it. The attitude I’ve adopted is that I don’t let any bacn enter my inbox. I have a filter set up that labels all incoming mail that I have identified as bacn (thankfully, bacn is much easier to identify than it’s drunken monkey uncle, spam) as such (‘Bacn’ if you must know the actual label used) and then immediately archives it. This is handy because I can know that if I have something in my inbox, it’s probably something I care about right now (thank you, GMail, for your awesome spam protection). Despite bacn being something I’m interested in, without proper attention it’s alarmingly easy to have hundreds of messages pile up in a matter of days. Seeing that I have 200 items it my bacn box can be quite discouraging so I end up not reading any of them. This is what I’d like to solve.
Assumptions
I’ll assume that bacn is consumable media. If I miss some topic that get’s covered on css-d, I know that A) I can search for it later and B) It’s more than likely to come up again. If I get a notification that someone wants to become my friend on Facebook and I miss it, I know that another notification will eventually come through and I’ll go to the site and find a friend request. In other words, bacn is expendable to the max, it’s just something that can interest you in the moment and is probably enlightening at the same time.
Solution?
What I’ve come up with is something I know I could do in Mail.app on my Mac (if i used that anymore) but I have no idea how to do in GMail. I basically want to say the following: Delete all messages that match a certain criteria (label=bacn;date received prior to midnight this morning) at such and such a time or even on a recurring basis. This would be somewhat trivial in a desktop app but how to do it in GMail is truly beyond me. Possibly with Greasemonkey somehow? Anyway, this is where I turn it over to you. Any thoughts? Is this something you’ve figured out how to do? Let me know in the comments or via e-mail.
