input.

Not exactly.

What you could do is this.

Create a few subfolders under your Inbox, one called Keep for a Week, one
called Keep for a Day, one called Keep for a Month, one called Keep Permanently.

Set up the Autoarchive settings on each of those subfolders to remove messages
(whether you archive or permanently delete) after the obvious period of time.

Set up a Search Folder (I'm going to assume you're running 2003 or greater
since you didn't bother to say) that basically will return all messages from
the Inbox and below.

Use the Search Folder, rather than the Inbox, for generic viewing of mail.

Move the message to whichever folder after reading.

Well, ok, after checking, if you pull up the options of a message, there
is a Message Expiry setting that it looks like you can set on a message and
it seems to work.  I still kinda like my solution, but either works pretty
well.  My solution works better if you want to archive the message and not
delete it.

If you have your Inbox emails listed by the date received all you have to do
is click to highlight the oldest one, move down to the date that you wish to
eliminate emails older than, hold down the shift key and click on that one.
That will highlight all emails older than the last one you clicked on.  Hit
the Delete key.  Voila!

That's what I do. But before I do that I save emails I don't want to delete.
I've made folders to contain emails I wish to keep.  I right click an email
I want to keep, choose Move to Folder and click on the folder I want to save
the email in.  It works the same way for Newsgroups except the only option
there is Copy to Folder.  I do that to save Newsgroup messages I want to
retain for my own reference.

Open the message and press the Options button. Here you can set an
expiration date for the email. You can then use AutoArchive to automatically
delete the expired items.

Thank you all for the suggestions, sorry I did not say that I am using
Outlook 2003.
Barbara