Shandor

Gives emails a shelf life and deletes them when they're expired.

Summary

My emails fall into several categories:

• Emails that I read once and won't need ever again.

• Emails that are only relevant for a short period of time (up to a year) and not needed after that.

• Emails that have value (to me) for a long time. For those I usually want to decide after some time whether they're still valuable.

Shandor helps me by deleting the emails from the first two categories at the right time. It also reminds me when it's time to judge those long-term emails again.

For that I tag my emails using notmuch. Every time I call Shandor, it looks into the notmuch database and figures out what to do with each email based on its tags. Emails with the tag deleted are actually deleted after two weeks. Emails with the tag 1w or 6m are going to be tagged as deleted after one week or six months, respectively. Emails with the tag j1y or j5y will be tagged judge after one or five years, respectively.

I also have categories whose emails should have a certain lifespan. For example, emails from Amazon can be deleted after three years. Since I don't want to put the tag 3y on every Amazon email, I can specify a premap that maps any tag to a Shandor tag.

Usage

WARNING This program deletes files. Deletes them. It is supposed to do so in an orderly fashion, but I don't give any guarantees that it might not delete your whole email folder. Read the code and make backups before you run it.

Download and compile the code.

$ git clone https://github.com/rmoehn/shandor
$ cd shandor
$ lein uberjar

Then, every day, run:

$ java -jar target/shandor-<current version>.jar \
    <path to directory with notmuch DB>
    [<path to the premap>]
$ notmuch new

Shandor will do the following:

• Emails with tag deleted: mark them for removal in two weeks.

• Emails with a time-to-live, i.e. tag Nd, Nw, Nm or Ny, where N is a natural number: mark them for expiry in N days, weeks, months or years.

• Emails that are expired: mark them for removal in two weeks.

• Emails whose removal date lies in the past: actually delete them.

• Emails with a time-to-judge, i.e. tag jNd, jNw, jNm or jNy, where N is a natural number: mark them for judgement in N days, weeks, months or years.

• Emails whose judgement date has passed: tag them with judge.

Right now, Shandor only deletes the email files from disk and not the corresponding entries in the database. notmuch new takes care of that.

The premap is an EDN file with a map from general tags to Shandor tags, like this:

{"amazon" "3y"
 "x-newsletter" "j5m"}

Providing it replaces the tags on the left side with the tags on the right side in Shandor's eyes. In other words, Shandor's compost algorithm won't see amazon or x-newsletter on an email, but 3y or j5m respectively.

Shandor logs extensively, so that you can reconstruct what happened to your emails. If you don't want logs, redirect Shandor's STDOUT to /dev/null. I recommend appending it to a log file, though. And I recommend using logrotate on that file.

A note on judging

Shandor doesn't remove tags. When the judgement date has passed, the emails to be judged will have tags like j1y JDY_1997-08-29 judge. When you judge those emails, you probably want to remove the previous tags and add new ones. For example, the email that had those tags listed above should now have only the tag deleted, or j5y. I don't want to take the time to build that into Shandor, so here's the process I use (independent of email client):

# From messages tagged "judge", remove tags except "judge".
$ notmuch tag --remove-all +judge -- tag:judge
# Now do your judging.
# Remove tag "judge" from the messages just judged.
$ notmuch tag -judge -- tag:judge

Comments

Based on the same thoughts as Moirai.

Right now the code is quite horrible and there are almost no tests. So I'm not sure whether one day it will delete all my emails. Good that I have backups and a log. Anyway, I think shelf lives are awesome.

See also The Web of Alexandria and The Web of Alexandria (follow-up).

Contains a half-arsed wrapper for accessing the notmuch library from Clojure, as well as an undocumented function to make the use of clojure-jna more idiomatic. If you're wanting to do useful Clojure programming, but don't know what to do, feel free to take these and make them better and publish/contribute them.

Known problems

If you get an error that contains »There is an incompatible JNA native library installed on this system«, uninstalling your system's libjna might help. Of course you can't do this if something depends on a system-wide installation of libjna (as opposed to an installation in your local Maven repo).

Changelog

• 2017-09-23 235b204a3b: Update to support libnotmuch 5. Won't work with versions before that. Note: As far as I know, nobody is using Shandor. If somebody was using it, I wouldn't be so reckless as to make breaking changes. If you are using it without me knowing, please let me know, so that I won't break your setup anymore.

Copyright and License

See LICENSE.txt in this repo.