I would like to be able to set up a silent period (at night for sleeping) where email alerts - but ONLY email alerts - will be silenced.
I still would like to have text messages and phone rings be normal.
Is there any way to do this automatically, without needing to go into the email app every night and turn off notifications and then remember to turn them back on in the morning?
If you do not depend on a data connection, there may be some solutions around: The Google Playstore has a lot of automation apps to offer, which you can use to set up more than this. In your case, this would be a time-based scenario:
From 11pm to 7am, disable WiFi and mobile data
No data connection => no new mail => no new mail notifications. Apps capable of things like that include e.g. Timeriffic (free, and one of the top-apps in this section), Llama (also capable of location-based and other rules), and -- my favorite -- Tasker. Though the latter is not the cheapest one, it is the most flexible, and you can get a 7-day-trial at their homepage.
For examples what else you can achieve with Tasker, you might also want to take a look at What is Cell standby and how can I keep it from eating my battery?, and the examples at the mentioned homepage. Also, a Google search on Tasker profiles will list you a lot of goodies.
To accomplish your goal using Tasker, simply create the following profile:
Context:
Task:
That's all. Say you defined it as described above (11pm to 7am), Tasker would switch off WiFi and Mobile Data at 11pm, and return to the previous state at 7am.
More solutions can probably be found here: Is it possible to only silence certain notifications?
Or one could use an alternate email client like K9 which has quiet hours feature built-in.
From Lollipop on, there is more granularity in Do not disturb mode:
Android Lollipop introduced the concept of “priority notifications”: These notifications rise to the top of the notifications screen, and you can choose to continue receiving auditory or vibration alerts for these notifications even when you have all other notifications muted.
To choose which notifications you’d like to treat as priority notifications, head on over to your phone’s Settings app, then tap Sound & notification—a one-stop shop of sorts for all things related to notifications and alert sounds. Next, tap Do not disturb, then tap Priority only allows. From this screen, you can choose to limit the sorts of notifications you’ll be alerted to.
You could also find the file being used as the tone for email (assuming it's unique to email) and rename it to [email_tone_name].bak for certain hours. Then when your time period has elapsed, rename [email_tone_name].bak to [email_tone_name].
You may actually need to have a silent tone file and rename [silent_file_name] to [email_tone_name]. It may be that it will pick some default if it can't find the one it's set to use.
