HN Explorer

Tell HN: Easy and Effective Gmail Cleanup

19 points by jinct ↗ HN
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

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 42.4 ms ] thread
nivertech
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
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.

nivertech
Do you know whether it's possible to prepay / pay for advance for a subscription?
NoZebra120vClip
For a personal Google One subscription, prepayment is definitely not available. You can be billed monthly or annually. Naturally, this is "pay in advance" so if you pay on October 1, your subscription lasts through October 31.

A few months ago, I canceled my subscription, and when I tried to re-enable autopay for it, I found that I could not, even though banner messages claimed I could. It turned out that I could not, in fact, re-subscribe until after the subscription had lapsed on its expiration day! I had no trouble doing that, and now, autopay is re-enabled for next year, but it sure was stress-inducing to just watch it expire.

anderiv
FWIW Google Workspace is indeed a subscription - it’s their business-focused offering, whereas Google One is consumer-focused. That said, there’s nothing preventing individuals or families from using Google Workspace - I do, and have for over a decade.

Workspace allows you to use your own domain and provide email/collaboration services for a number of people under the same domain.

animeshz
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.

fiftyacorn
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
KomoD
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
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.

jinct
Once I wiped my account of marketing emails, the new ones that came in were glaringly obvious, and I unsubscribed from each one as they came in.

Gmail has a nice unsubscribe feature that another poster linked to an article about. It’s as easy as tapping the … menu and selecting Unsubscribe in the iOS app. It worked well for almost all of my unwanted subscriptions.

I am now deleting all unwanted email and maintaining a clean inbox with close to zero effort.