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Tell HN: Easy and Effective Gmail Cleanup

19 points| jinct | 2 years ago

My Gmail was nearing the 15GB free tier limit. I tried a few things to try to pinpoint the largest emails to delete, from searching for large attachments to writing code to count emails by sender. The problem was there were no large emails, just many thousands of often daily marketing emails. Identifying and deleting emails from frequent senders proved quite labor intensive.

In the end, the simplest solution was the most effective. I searched for the word "unsubscribe", selected all results across all result pages, and deleted them. I searched my Trash for a few senders I wanted to make sure not to delete email from, moved them back to the inbox, and I was done.

Easy.

13 comments

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animeshz|2 years ago

I really like the yahoo mobile interface, for one it lists all the subscriptions and unsubscribe button at one panel, second its search is really powerful and can pick all the matching mails from certain sender, or having some word occurring (unlike Gmail, in its mobile you can't select all, and in desktop everything is paginated).

It also lists all transactions mail in one panel, so you can clear them at once if everything is checked, you can however use gmail to filter down the promotional and spam emails and clear them at once from desktop.

I initially thought of using python or something with SMTP, but it wasn't that feasible than how much mobile yahoo client helped me. I trimmed down 6 mailbox with over 20k mails each (one of them going over 43k), to around 40 mails on each.

nivertech|2 years ago

How much time did you already spent on it (and will need to do in the future also)?

A Google Workspace account for a single user is relatively cheap.

So I'm not sure it was economical.

But the problem with the paid account, is that you may easily lose it in case of a CC failure/expiration.

NoZebra120vClip|2 years ago

I have a subscription to Google One (which is what you mean; Google Workspaces isn't a subscription, it's a suite of apps.)

It has some good perks. I am, however, petrified of going over the "free tier" storage limit, because if I do lose, or cancel, that One membership, then my Gmail will be completely disabled until I can bail out enough storage to go back under the 15GiB again. I think that's an extremely undesirable failure mode indeed.

That being said, searching for "unsubscribe" is definitely a genius shortcut, and I'm going to try it and see how it works for me. However, I also have enough personal correspondence over the years, with significant attachments that I'd need to scrutinize as well.

KomoD|2 years ago

Do you just let emails pile up? I use 159mb on Gmail, inbox always cleared, important emails (billing, account stuff, etc.) put into "starred"

warner25|2 years ago

I'm like you (in fact I delete everything after looking at it, effectively only storing what's quoted in my sent box) but yes I think most people do just let emails pile up, from what I've seen whenever I catch a glimpse of anyone else's inbox. They get emails that they don't want and never open, but also don't bother to delete them or unsubscribe until they hit a storage limit.

I do love the elegance of searching with the "unsubscribe" keyword, but it doesn't solve the problem of the inbox filling up with junk again. I wonder how dangerous it would be to put in place a filter rule that deletes anything received with that keyword. I think the next most common phrase is "manage your email preferences" or "communication preferences." I'm curious to search my wife's Gmail inbox with these terms to see the precision and recall for myself.

fiftyacorn|2 years ago

It annoys me bulk delete is so hard on gmail - best i can think of is to get the email backup from google takeout and bulk delete the lot