For some inboxes there’s no reason to keep anything beyond a certain date. For example ports-changes@ isn’t too relevant to save the emails for an extended period of time. So slowly, but very surely, that mail folder reached 30k messages.

While in the past I’ve manually deleted a full year of email by putting a weight on the d key (no kidding), there had to be a simpler way. Turns out there is with tagging. Short version: T -> ~d __range__ -> ; -> d. But there is an ever quicker way without tagging messages first.

So let’s say I want to remove all messages from the last year (2014, since I might still want to lookup messages from this year) from a given inbox.

Hit D to get this prompt:

Delete messages matching:

Then enter the date range:

Delete messages matching: ~d 01/01/2014-31/12/2014

That’s all there is to it and I cannot believe I didn’t figure this out earlier…