dealing with inbox clutter

[mgorse at mgorse.dhs.org (Mike Gorse)]

Hi all,

I find that my inbox tends to accumulate messages and become bloated over 
time, and a lot of the email I get is time-specific (ie, about an event 
that will happen on a certain date or something that needs to be done by a 
certain date).  So it would be nice if I could make messages expire by a 
certain date and have them automatically removed from my inbox after that 
date has passed.  (I don't mean this in a digital rights management sense 
but something I could set on a message I've received.)  Do any mail 
clients have a feature that will do this?  I was thinking about trying to 
set my computer up so that I could, say, forward a message to 
expire-20040301 and have it go into a file along with a note saying that 
it should be deleted on the 1st, and then having a cron script that would 
look through the file and the inbox and delete things that have expired.  
Of course, I have no idea how difficult this would be (I know practically 
nothing about configuring sendmail or anything else, but then it seems 
like it would be a good time to learn.)  Or can anyone suggest an easier 
way to do it?

Thanks,

-- Michael Gorse / AIM:linvortex / http://mgorse.home.dhs.org --
A better world is possible! http://www.kucinich.us