[avar]

    > The one thing I'll want is what we'll never
    > get which is just making it easier to delete
    > e-mails in bulk.

This already "exists", go to a label, tick the top checkbox above all the rows, then "Select all 5,192 conversations in 'ThisLabel'", then "Delete".

"Exists" in scare quotes because their own interface is absolutely atrocious for doing this, as on e.g. a label with ~50k messages (I was mass-deleting some large mailing lists recently) there's maybe a 5-10% change the operation will eventually finish, and not just leave it at ~45k or whatever.

But you can do this by setting up a local IMAP client and doing mass-deletes that way. Perhaps the easiest on e.g. *nix systems is to use isync (the "mbsync" command) to "sync" between two folders locally and remotely, with a rule saying "anything deleted locally, delete it on the remote too".

Then just sync between an empty local folder and your remote target folder, and it'll slowly grind through it. You can also use a local GUI E-Mail client, but most of those become slow/unresponsive with a mass-delete operation, whereas you can spin up multiple "mbsync" commands with retries.

Beware that GMail has (or did, last I tried this) some sort of per-account I/O limit or similar, so if you're doing background operations like this you might find the web interface (even on an unrelated computer/network connection) becomes slow or unresponsive.

[Izkata]

> This already "exists", go to a label, tick the top checkbox above all the rows, then "Select all 5,192 conversations in 'ThisLabel'", then "Delete".

Also works with any search.

> "Exists" in scare quotes because their own interface is absolutely atrocious for doing this, as on e.g. a label with ~50k messages (I was mass-deleting some large mailing lists recently) there's maybe a 5-10% change the operation will eventually finish, and not just leave it at ~45k or whatever.

I've found it to work fairly reliably with that much or more, if you leave the tab open and just wait. It seems to do an initial UI update with those ~5k or so, then continue deleting in the background. Feels like it's done entirely in the frontend, where it deletes a batch, grabs the next, delete, grab next, delete, etc etc etc.