gmail-helper

Productivity

email management

SHOW HN2020

gmail-helper

Gmail CLI Utils (bulk delete mail by query, get/create filters)

github.com

#gmail cli#gmail filters#bulk delete email#gmail api

192points
39comments
#291of 3,028 in 2020
Top 10%of 2020 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

3 positive, 7 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 3 critical, out of 13 comments about the project. Thread score +0.15.

Performance: 0 for, 3 againstIdea: 2 for, 0 againstExecution: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Useful and sweet to see built

    From 3 comments
    • This looks useful! For "Declarative configuration for Gmail filters", see also https://github.com/mbrt/gmailctl
      adamfeldman on HN
    • This is sweet. If you're interested, I'd be happy to help out with your todo to integrate with a local database. Getting the rate-limiting and retries right can be a little…
      matlin on HN
    • I will be going to work tomorrow and baking this into our email test suite.
      jimbob45 on HN

Objections

  • Bulk deletion in the Gmail web UI is unreliable for very large mailboxes

    From 3 comments
    • Having gone through this recently you'll see a spinner/progress indicator. Then a short time later it'll terminate and half your messages will still be present. I took several…
      stevekemp on HN
    • I've had the same issue spanning years. I didn't bother going further than the web UI. I would delete 100k+ messages, it would hang, and when it returned it would only have…
      pfranz on HN
    • I know this is an odd question but... Have you tried deleting a very large number of messages? I am talking about > 100,000. I once needed to clean up > million messages and it…
      notyourday on HN

Requests

  • Find and delete messages by attachment size

    From 2 comments
    • Related: would this tool let me analyze my gmail for cleanup? That is, identify which senders/domains send me the most email by number or size. Some way to automatically download…
      harikb on HN
    • How might I use this to delete emails with big attachments? Can I filter and delete by message size? I'm cheap. :-)
      ronyeh on HN
  • Automatic label creation based on sender and open behaviour

    From 1 comment
    • This is nice. A couple of days back I was thinking of a utility where labels are created automatically. It uses meta information like: ``` * How many emails I get from a sender *…
      aryamaan on HN

Questions

  • Can it handle deleting very large numbers of messages?

    From 1 comment
    • I know this is an odd question but... Have you tried deleting a very large number of messages? I am talking about > 100,000. I once needed to clean up > million messages and it…
      notyourday on HN
  • Is there a way to add a single filter without recreating all of them?

    From 1 comment
    • I did something similar - in fact looking at the add filter, very similar, where I add a label to certain mails by query and then delete - but the weirdest part was i could not…
      lifeisstillgood on HN

Alternatives named

  • gmailctl for declarative Gmail filter configuration

    From 1 comment
    • This looks useful! For "Declarative configuration for Gmail filters", see also https://github.com/mbrt/gmailctl
      adamfeldman on HN
  • Gmail search has:attachment larger:5M

    From 1 comment
    • I know this isn't exactly what you are looking for, but I run this search once every few months: [has:attachment larger:5M] That finds everything bigger than 5 megabytes. You…
      jedberg on HN
  • labeller procmail-style Gmail rules

    From 1 comment
    • See also my little hack, a sort of procmail for gmail, with a small scripting language: https://github.com/skx/labeller/ Adding/Removing labels based upon arbitrary…
      stevekemp on HN
  • notmuch and mbsync for email cleanup

    From 1 comment
    • Related: I recently used mbsync and notmuch to clean-up my Outlook/Live/Office email account. A one-liner to get email count per domain: ``` notmuch address '*' | sed "s/^.*@//"…
      tleb_ on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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