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Ask HN: Sorting 8k emails, any tools to make this easier?

5 points by Rjevski ↗ HN
My email archive currently sits around 8k emails. I'd like to clean it up a little bit, deleting irrelevant stuff as to reduce my (and my clients') exposure should it get leaked. At the same time, there is some stuff I'm legally required to keep (invoices for taxes, etc) so I can't just delete everything past a certain date.

Does anyone have any tips on how to tackle this, or know any tools/services that can help out?

Thanks!

9 comments

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rococode
Maybe not the answer you're looking for, but if it's not a rush you can probably do it manually. 8k is not so much, you can probably go through it with a couple minutes a day for a few weeks, or within a week if you take like 30 minutes a day.

If you're going through an email every 2 seconds it's only a little over 4 hours of work which isn't too bad. And for the most part you'll probably be skimming senders/subjects so it won't take anywhere near 2 seconds per email.

sebch
I use neomutt for email. It has a tagging feature, which support regex, pretty efficient for moving or deleting many similar emails all at once.
hambos22
I've used [0]Mailstrom before for about 35K emails and I've managed to clean 30K of them. Take a look of it, its cheap too ($7/month).

[0]mailstrom.co

cimmanom
Sort your inbox by sender or subject and then file or delete entire conversations or blocks of emails at once.

Last time I did that with a 7k email inbox it took about 2.5 hours to get to inbox zero.

quickthrower2
Is disk space an issue? If not, chuck it all in a folder call "OLD" and use your email search when you need to find an invoice or whatnot.
Rjevski
One of objectives is to make sure no unneeded data is kept, in case the account gets compromised. This does not solve that issue unfortunately.
wingerlang
This (macOS) app is for power users, out of the box it will show you statistics about sender/attachments/contents etc of your emails. I don't user it myself but the first thing I thought of when I opened it was that it might be good if I ever needed to sort out my emails.

https://freron.com/

tushartyagi
Assuming the mails are still online with the mail provider, I think that copying that data on local disk, indexing and then running queries on it should work. Doing this locally will save time and then you can sync back the changes.

I know of two tools which might help.

One that I use is more Emacs oriented. My personal setup uses mu4e[1], fetches emails using mbsync, indexes the emails using mu and allows you to run queries based on date/time/subject/content etc. You can quickly search, mark, delete and archive emails.

The other option would be to use a similar combination of notmuch, offlineimap and mutt[2]. I have used mutt but with the online services (i.e. without downloading my emails locally), so I am not sure how that will work. But mutt also support similar tagging and searching and running operations on selected emails.

Caveat: Make sure you have enough understanding with what you do with these tools, they also have the capacity to delete all your emails on cloud. Perhaps run the queries on some test emails first.

[1]http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e/

[2]stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/