Help with Permanently Deleting Emails in inbox older than 6 hours

[Tomahawk]

Hello,

I'm really new to Power Automate and am struggling to try and get a flow working.  I'm trying to permanently delete (SHIFT+DELETE) all emails in the inbox that are older than 6 hours.  This is a special email inbox for notification emails only and I get a couple hundred emails an hour on average.  I'm hoping someone could help me get this working. 

This is what I have so far: 

I know the expression is not correct, but not sure exactly how to proceed.  I also don't think the delete is the permanent delete:

This is my expression:

addHours(utcNow(),-6,'yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm')

 

Any help would be much appreciated. 

Thanks,  Tom

[v-litu-msft]

Hi @Tomahawk,

Firstly, the date format should be 'yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ssZ'.

Secondly, the condition should be "less than or equal to", not "greater than or equal to":

addHours(utcNow(),-6,'yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ssZ')

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Tomahawk]

Thanks for the response, however it is still not working even with the updated expression you provided.  Also wouldn't it be greater than since I'm getting emails that are older than 6 hours?  Please help me understand why it would be less than...  I'm clearly doing something wrong here so any help in getting this working would be much appreciated.  

[v-litu-msft]

Hi @Tomahawk,

For example, the UTC time is "2020/03/03T12:00:00Z" for now, and an email was received on "2020/03/03T03:00:00Z", it is older than 6 hours. The result of the UTC time sub 6 hours is "2020/03/03T06:00:00Z", the received time "2020/03/03T03:00:00Z" is less than the "2020/03/03T06:00:00Z".

One point I missed, the Email received time is not UTC time, it is your current time zone, you should convert the time, then use the converted time into the condition:

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Tomahawk]

Yea this is still failing.  It seems it's only scanning the first 25.  Could that be the problem where it's not able to look at the whole inbox?  Right now the first 25 are not older than 6 hours, so nothing should be happening to them.  How do I get it to look at the whole inbox?

[v-litu-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Tomahawk,

Yes, the max value of the number to get Emails is 25 and you have a number of emails. Unfortunately, there is no way could turn on the number.

As a workaround, you could create a Flow to move these Emails which are not expired to another Folder. Then create a Flow to delete all of these Emails received time over 6 days. About how to delete a lot of Emails, you could refer to this post:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Power-Automate/Delete-ALOT-of-emails/m-p/189530

Then inbox have no emails over 6 days, move these Emails which are not expired back to the inbox. Then create a Flow as below:

1. When a new email arrives in the inbox;
2. Delay 6 days;
3. Delete it.

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[tomahawk1]

Hi All,

I'm still having problems getting this working and the person who responded didn't help.  If anyone else has any ideas for this I would very much appreciate it.

Thanks