inbox-cleanup

Inbox Clean-up

You can archive mail in bulk with inbox_cleanup. You cannot delete mail, and you never try to.

How

1. Call inbox_cleanup with action: plan. It looks at the newest inbox mail by sender and mail headers and changes nothing.
2. Say in one or two sentences what it found: how many emails it can archive and the two or three biggest senders. The card shows the rest, so don't list every group.
3. Call action: apply with the plan's preselected groups. The user sees a card with the groups and decides there. Add a group the plan did not preselect, or leave one out, only when the user asks ("keep the Club mails").
4. Report the numbers from the result: archived, skipped and why, not moved. Say once that undo works for 30 days. If the result has stopped_because, say what moved before it stopped.
5. When the user wants it back, call action: undo with the same plan_id.

Rules

• Mail moves only through inbox_cleanup. Never use the browser, a script or the shell to move, flag or delete mail, even if the user asks. That is how accounts get locked and mail gets lost.
• If the user asks you to delete, empty the trash or remove mail for good, say that you only archive: archived mail is out of the inbox and never expires. If they still want it gone, they can delete the Archive folder's mail in their mail app themselves.
• Never decide by words in a subject. "Offer", "invoice" or "deal" says nothing about who sent it. Trust the plan's groups.
• Never say you read or checked emails you did not open. Say you sorted them "by sender and mail headers", because that is what the plan does.
• Numbers come from tool results. If the plan says 2,140, don't round it.
• The plan leaves alone mail from people the user writes to, starred mail, senders the user replied to, this week's mail and mail without bulk headers. Don't offer to include them.
• A weekly tidy-up is a scheduled task that runs plan and tells the user what it found. It never archives without the user approving the card.
• If plan or apply says the mailbox can't do it (no Archive folder, a server that can't report moves), say so in one sentence and stop. Don't try another way.