Paying the price for being a Gmail early adopter
August 26, 2024 11:16 PM Subscribe
I was one of the lucky, the chosen few millions of dweebs who were given Gmail accounts back when it was the new hotness about 19 years ago or so. As a result, I have lots and lots of email, with a good portion of it spam that has just gotten out of control (thanks, Obama fundraisers!), and now Google wants me to pay to keep getting email — i.e., pay to keep from getting spam. I don't want to pay them for something they said would be free, and I don't want to pay them for a weak spam filter, and I can't change my primary email address without major changes to my digital life, so...
My question is: Is it possible to automate migrating my many gigs of Gmail emails into some kind of detached-from-Google open-source "container" that I store locally, which I can search in the ways I am able to search my Gmail currently? (Assume I have some command-line/git chops here.)
Then I would — nervously — delete emails older than a couple years, say, thus freeing up storage and keeping the Google collectors off my back. Is this doable in 2024?
I doubt I am talking about an IMAP client, like Apple Mail or Thunderbird. In my previous experience with them, I don't think they have an easy time with not corrupting a database containing significant amounts of email; the built-in search is notably terrible in those clients; and, I'd need to know with some certainty that they have a solid copy of each email that I intend to wipe from the Gmail servers.
A solid search engine would be nice. Grep is a fine tool for genomic sequences but wouldn't probably dig out the nugget I need from an email from a family member from 15 years ago.
I don't even know if a Gmail-in-a-box kind of solution even exists, and I may have to cough up the money, but I figured I would ask in case someone else has solved this. Thanks!
My question is: Is it possible to automate migrating my many gigs of Gmail emails into some kind of detached-from-Google open-source "container" that I store locally, which I can search in the ways I am able to search my Gmail currently? (Assume I have some command-line/git chops here.)
Then I would — nervously — delete emails older than a couple years, say, thus freeing up storage and keeping the Google collectors off my back. Is this doable in 2024?
I doubt I am talking about an IMAP client, like Apple Mail or Thunderbird. In my previous experience with them, I don't think they have an easy time with not corrupting a database containing significant amounts of email; the built-in search is notably terrible in those clients; and, I'd need to know with some certainty that they have a solid copy of each email that I intend to wipe from the Gmail servers.
A solid search engine would be nice. Grep is a fine tool for genomic sequences but wouldn't probably dig out the nugget I need from an email from a family member from 15 years ago.
I don't even know if a Gmail-in-a-box kind of solution even exists, and I may have to cough up the money, but I figured I would ask in case someone else has solved this. Thanks!
Response by poster: Neglected to note I am on Mac OS X (Unix), not Windows.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:50 PM on August 26
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:50 PM on August 26
I doubt I am talking about an IMAP client, like Apple Mail or Thunderbird.
IMAP Will be the protocol by which you archive stuff out of GMail. Mutt and Alpine should be in MacPorts or Brew, are terminal programs for Email, and both mutt and alpine can connect to GMail and store mail in plain-text mbox format. This plain-text format is an internet standard, plus it's picked up by macOS's own Spotlight search index (Stack Overflow, archive.org copy of source MacWorld hint).
posted by k3ninho at 12:33 AM on August 27 [2 favorites]
IMAP Will be the protocol by which you archive stuff out of GMail. Mutt and Alpine should be in MacPorts or Brew, are terminal programs for Email, and both mutt and alpine can connect to GMail and store mail in plain-text mbox format. This plain-text format is an internet standard, plus it's picked up by macOS's own Spotlight search index (Stack Overflow, archive.org copy of source MacWorld hint).
posted by k3ninho at 12:33 AM on August 27 [2 favorites]
This isn't the question you asked, like at all, but I solved the problem you have an age ago by using Gmail's autosorted tabs, being careful to monitor what goes into Promotions, Updates, Social, and so on, being sure to accept the dialogues for "do you want all emails of this type to go into this box from now on", and deleting everything in Promotions in particular every so often. If you do this, I think the problem you're having largely goes away. It especially goes away if you grab the sender who has sent you a large volume of mail (i.e. not your uncle Norman), search on them, and delete everything.
DNC and related PAC emails are a big offender in this regard, but, well, I guess we like democracy and keep getting those emails. I believe there's also an opt-less on a lot of those lists but that will not help you get rid of the ones from 2008.
Apologies if answering the question you didn't ask is an overstep -- this is just the way in which I, also an early adopter, don't have the issue you're having. But I gotta be aggressive about deleting everything in Promotions and sometimes everything in Social and older stuff in Updates. I don't use tabs other than those and the main one (important/personal things stay in the main one).
posted by verbminx at 12:57 AM on August 27 [7 favorites]
DNC and related PAC emails are a big offender in this regard, but, well, I guess we like democracy and keep getting those emails. I believe there's also an opt-less on a lot of those lists but that will not help you get rid of the ones from 2008.
Apologies if answering the question you didn't ask is an overstep -- this is just the way in which I, also an early adopter, don't have the issue you're having. But I gotta be aggressive about deleting everything in Promotions and sometimes everything in Social and older stuff in Updates. I don't use tabs other than those and the main one (important/personal things stay in the main one).
posted by verbminx at 12:57 AM on August 27 [7 favorites]
I have lots and lots of email, with a good portion of it spam
Before digging into complex solutions like setting up a local archive or deleting old emails it makes you nervous to delete, why not delete the spam?
Have you taken advantage of the low-hanging fruit behind the "Clean up space" button at the top of the page which comes up when you click on the "xGB of 15GB used (y%)" at the bottom of your inbox? Addressing big attachments and large numbers of meaningless old messages could buy you several gigabytes/years. Twenty minutes aggressively searching for and deleting emails you don't need (even manually) is underrated.
posted by daveliepmann at 1:04 AM on August 27 [7 favorites]
Before digging into complex solutions like setting up a local archive or deleting old emails it makes you nervous to delete, why not delete the spam?
Have you taken advantage of the low-hanging fruit behind the "Clean up space" button at the top of the page which comes up when you click on the "xGB of 15GB used (y%)" at the bottom of your inbox? Addressing big attachments and large numbers of meaningless old messages could buy you several gigabytes/years. Twenty minutes aggressively searching for and deleting emails you don't need (even manually) is underrated.
posted by daveliepmann at 1:04 AM on August 27 [7 favorites]
Response by poster: why not delete the spam?
The problem is that I have spam intertwined with stuff I want to keep over nearly a couple decades, and so I have to be very careful about what I flag for permanent deletion.
What's worse is that Gmail shows inbox contents 50 messages at a time. By using Google's UI, it would take me weeks to probably a couple months of manual labor to carefully flag and manually delete spam, not twenty minutes. This is why I'm looking for a way to reliably archive to something searchable, before doing bulk deletions.
I do realize this may be too much of an ask and I've painted myself into a corner. Just wondering if there are others who have solved this before I look at doing things by hand.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:25 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]
The problem is that I have spam intertwined with stuff I want to keep over nearly a couple decades, and so I have to be very careful about what I flag for permanent deletion.
What's worse is that Gmail shows inbox contents 50 messages at a time. By using Google's UI, it would take me weeks to probably a couple months of manual labor to carefully flag and manually delete spam, not twenty minutes. This is why I'm looking for a way to reliably archive to something searchable, before doing bulk deletions.
I do realize this may be too much of an ask and I've painted myself into a corner. Just wondering if there are others who have solved this before I look at doing things by hand.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:25 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]
First of all, you can use Google takeout to download an archive of your stuff (it takes a few days for this to work for whatever reason). Then make a backup of it in case it ever gets corrupted. It's worth having an exported copy of your emails regardless, especially if there are photos and videos in there that you care about and haven't had a habit of downloading.
Then I'd use the Gmail interface to start deleting as follows: find some spam. Copy the sender address and delete all emails by that sender. That will often get you hundreds of deletions at a time: you click the checkbox to select all of the search results on the page, click where it says "screw just this page, select all the search results", and hit delete. (Unless the UX has changed since the last time I did this.)
When you get bored of that you can also search for messages larger than some size and start working on things from that end.
Eventually, when you've stripped most of the chaff out of your inbox, I would do another export and/or use Thunderbird or whatever to download its own copy. Then make backups of those so you don't have to be afraid of something getting corrupted some day, and delete the original backup you made before you deleted the crap. This all admittedly will take a lot of disk space and since offsite backups are a good idea you may also pay for an online backup service... But that's probably a good thing to do anyway.
posted by trig at 2:04 AM on August 27 [22 favorites]
Then I'd use the Gmail interface to start deleting as follows: find some spam. Copy the sender address and delete all emails by that sender. That will often get you hundreds of deletions at a time: you click the checkbox to select all of the search results on the page, click where it says "screw just this page, select all the search results", and hit delete. (Unless the UX has changed since the last time I did this.)
When you get bored of that you can also search for messages larger than some size and start working on things from that end.
Eventually, when you've stripped most of the chaff out of your inbox, I would do another export and/or use Thunderbird or whatever to download its own copy. Then make backups of those so you don't have to be afraid of something getting corrupted some day, and delete the original backup you made before you deleted the crap. This all admittedly will take a lot of disk space and since offsite backups are a good idea you may also pay for an online backup service... But that's probably a good thing to do anyway.
posted by trig at 2:04 AM on August 27 [22 favorites]
In my experience what takes up space is not the thousands of 10KB spam mails, it's the tiny number of 100Mb emails of vacation pictures from friends. So searching "larger:10mb" in Gmail might help you.
I use the command-line tool GMVault to archive my Gmail to .eml files including attachments. Not sure I'd recommend it though, it's been unmaintained for years now and requires increasing contortions to work with OAuth.
posted by Klipspringer at 2:10 AM on August 27 [12 favorites]
I use the command-line tool GMVault to archive my Gmail to .eml files including attachments. Not sure I'd recommend it though, it's been unmaintained for years now and requires increasing contortions to work with OAuth.
posted by Klipspringer at 2:10 AM on August 27 [12 favorites]
I realize that wasn't exactly the kind of answer you wanted, but I'm not sure how you could comfortably trust any software if you can't trust major clients like Thunderbird or Apple Mail, so I think downloads and backups are the way to go.
But also: If I'm not mistaken Takeout lets you export only emails with some label. If you want to break up your archive into more manageable slices, you could do stuff like creating filters in Gmail to label all emails by year, or by certain senders, or message size or any other category you can search for. And then run a bunch of Takeout exports for each year or whatever panels you set up.
Then you'd have more manageably sized archives to deal with, and possibly feel more comfortable deleting emails from a given year.
You can also set up Gmail filters for emails from family or friends, and for things like PDF attachments that have a higher likelihood of being important, and then run searches, deletions, or exports on those categories.
posted by trig at 2:16 AM on August 27
But also: If I'm not mistaken Takeout lets you export only emails with some label. If you want to break up your archive into more manageable slices, you could do stuff like creating filters in Gmail to label all emails by year, or by certain senders, or message size or any other category you can search for. And then run a bunch of Takeout exports for each year or whatever panels you set up.
Then you'd have more manageably sized archives to deal with, and possibly feel more comfortable deleting emails from a given year.
You can also set up Gmail filters for emails from family or friends, and for things like PDF attachments that have a higher likelihood of being important, and then run searches, deletions, or exports on those categories.
posted by trig at 2:16 AM on August 27
Google wants me to pay to keep getting email — i.e., pay to keep from getting spam
Sorry are you trying to be clever here? I assume you mean you have run out of free storage and Google wants you to pay for additional storage? Because I've been using Gmail as long as you have, and that is what Google wanted me to do.
I staved off the storage problems for about 3 years by clever deletions, but decided a year ago my time was worth more than $1.60 a month and so went ahead and bought the Google One whatever. I believe it was a worthwhile use of my money and time.
But here is what I did in the meantime; Klipspringer is absolutely correct, it's not marketing email that's taking up space.
I did the larger than 10mb search and started taking notes.
I had hundreds of huge file emails from senders at an organization I used to volunteer for. I will never need to read the 14mb full color PDF about the 2013 fall product sale offerings ever again, so all of those went right in the trash.
So did the hundreds of FW: Fwd: FW: FWD: tHE REDNECK sAiD TO HIS PASTOR!!!!!/ORDER CORN style emails from my grandma back when she was on email that have the same 12 animated clip arts of kittens in sunshine repeated all 327 times the damn thing has been forwarded. Another easy cut.
Also huge? USPS Informed Delivery. Full of daily hi res images going back years. I don't need to know what mail I was expecting April 6 2014 and neither do you. Gone.
So anyway yeah, set the large file search limiter, set the dates back to so long ago you've forgotten half the random people who were desperate to show you their Lake Tahoe trip, and cut cut cut. Targeted searching like this will make it much easier to bulk remove some big storage drains.
(And again, for every hour you spend working on this problem, however you choose to solve it, ask yourself if that time has been worth the 1/5th of 1 cent you are effectively saving yourself by doing it. Seriously... thinking about problems in this way has made a whole lot of life decisions easier for me.)
posted by phunniemee at 4:30 AM on August 27 [41 favorites]
Sorry are you trying to be clever here? I assume you mean you have run out of free storage and Google wants you to pay for additional storage? Because I've been using Gmail as long as you have, and that is what Google wanted me to do.
I staved off the storage problems for about 3 years by clever deletions, but decided a year ago my time was worth more than $1.60 a month and so went ahead and bought the Google One whatever. I believe it was a worthwhile use of my money and time.
But here is what I did in the meantime; Klipspringer is absolutely correct, it's not marketing email that's taking up space.
I did the larger than 10mb search and started taking notes.
I had hundreds of huge file emails from senders at an organization I used to volunteer for. I will never need to read the 14mb full color PDF about the 2013 fall product sale offerings ever again, so all of those went right in the trash.
So did the hundreds of FW: Fwd: FW: FWD: tHE REDNECK sAiD TO HIS PASTOR!!!!!/ORDER CORN style emails from my grandma back when she was on email that have the same 12 animated clip arts of kittens in sunshine repeated all 327 times the damn thing has been forwarded. Another easy cut.
Also huge? USPS Informed Delivery. Full of daily hi res images going back years. I don't need to know what mail I was expecting April 6 2014 and neither do you. Gone.
So anyway yeah, set the large file search limiter, set the dates back to so long ago you've forgotten half the random people who were desperate to show you their Lake Tahoe trip, and cut cut cut. Targeted searching like this will make it much easier to bulk remove some big storage drains.
(And again, for every hour you spend working on this problem, however you choose to solve it, ask yourself if that time has been worth the 1/5th of 1 cent you are effectively saving yourself by doing it. Seriously... thinking about problems in this way has made a whole lot of life decisions easier for me.)
posted by phunniemee at 4:30 AM on August 27 [41 favorites]
By the way, just searching for the word "unsubscribe" will get you thousands of likely deletion candidates (and, as noted, you're not limited to deleting only 50 at a time).
posted by trig at 5:14 AM on August 27 [8 favorites]
posted by trig at 5:14 AM on August 27 [8 favorites]
Yep, I was also a gmail early adopter and a while back I did the search by file size thing. Culprits included: confidentiality pdfs automatically attached to emails from multiple older relatives who are lawyers using their work email for personal communication, political spam from up to four elections ago, vast swathes of uncompressed inline images on unread group email chains from fifteen years ago, an untold number of poorly formatted advertisements from now-defunct companies. So, definitely try that trick before you spend a bunch of time with exporting and sorting and all that.
posted by Mizu at 5:33 AM on August 27 [3 favorites]
posted by Mizu at 5:33 AM on August 27 [3 favorites]
I too have a GMail account from early 2005. Besides the large file search in GMail. what was taking up a lot of space was my own files in Drive and many thousands of photos in Photos. The account size freebie is inclusive of all of Google's apps that are under the same login email account.
What I do is forward every email I get to another GMail account. I set up [UsernameX2022@gmail] for each year and, at the end of the year or at any point in the year, I have an "archive" of a copy of all my emails from that year,
If I were you, and I am not, I would first look at my other Google apps such as Drive and delete any file there I don't need or want and also at Photos for any large photo files that you have backed up elsewhere and delete as many of those as you are comfortable with. (I would use the previously mentioned Google TakeOut for all my photos prior to culling any.) I would then set up GMail accounts to forward my emails to by year or by several years. I would then use the "unsubscribe" button with vengence. It sounds like most of what you call Spam is really just junk mail that somehow you got on a mailing list. Unsubscribe and if that does not cut them down, block the email addresses. Then I would create tags in my gmail by user or by junk and sort on that to see what I can delete. But, ultimately, just paying a small amount a month for Google one is worth a lot to me in terms of time and effort. (See phunniemee above).
posted by JohnnyGunn at 7:23 AM on August 27 [4 favorites]
What I do is forward every email I get to another GMail account. I set up [UsernameX2022@gmail] for each year and, at the end of the year or at any point in the year, I have an "archive" of a copy of all my emails from that year,
If I were you, and I am not, I would first look at my other Google apps such as Drive and delete any file there I don't need or want and also at Photos for any large photo files that you have backed up elsewhere and delete as many of those as you are comfortable with. (I would use the previously mentioned Google TakeOut for all my photos prior to culling any.) I would then set up GMail accounts to forward my emails to by year or by several years. I would then use the "unsubscribe" button with vengence. It sounds like most of what you call Spam is really just junk mail that somehow you got on a mailing list. Unsubscribe and if that does not cut them down, block the email addresses. Then I would create tags in my gmail by user or by junk and sort on that to see what I can delete. But, ultimately, just paying a small amount a month for Google one is worth a lot to me in terms of time and effort. (See phunniemee above).
posted by JohnnyGunn at 7:23 AM on August 27 [4 favorites]
If you are using the different labels you can also do a search like "in:promotions older_than:30d" and then select all, then click the link saying you really want to select all and delete.
you could also do this with terms like "unsubscribe"
posted by ArgentCorvid at 7:28 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]
you could also do this with terms like "unsubscribe"
posted by ArgentCorvid at 7:28 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]
I'd third doing a Google Takeout before you do anything else.
I quit google many, many years ago, but I'm currently looking at both a huge .mbox file and a folder of HTML files that I took with me.
I believe both came from a Takeout. I've used the .mbox file to transfer to other services a couple of times. And the raw HTML files are extremely searchable as-is, since they're really just text. They even include a clickable index list and all the attachments.
It's possible I'm misremembering and I used Thunderbird to make the HTML files out of the .mbox, but they've ultimately been the handiest format.
posted by Snijglau at 7:57 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]
I quit google many, many years ago, but I'm currently looking at both a huge .mbox file and a folder of HTML files that I took with me.
I believe both came from a Takeout. I've used the .mbox file to transfer to other services a couple of times. And the raw HTML files are extremely searchable as-is, since they're really just text. They even include a clickable index list and all the attachments.
It's possible I'm misremembering and I used Thunderbird to make the HTML files out of the .mbox, but they've ultimately been the handiest format.
posted by Snijglau at 7:57 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]
I don't want to pay them for something they said would be free, and I don't want to pay them for a weak spam filter, and I can't change my primary email address without major changes to my digital life
How would you feel about paying for an excellent service that nobody ever said would be free?
I jumped ship from Gmail to Fastmail eleven years ago. Migrating my entire Gmail archive to Fastmail using Fastmail's IMAP importer tool was straightforward. Having verified that I had all my stuff, I emptied my Gmail account and set up a forwarding rule so that everything arriving in my Gmail inbox gets a copy forwarded to my Fastmail address, then Gmail's copy marked as read and moved to Trash. So I still get mails addressed to my Gmail address but I don't have to deal with Google's commitment to random UI and account policy fuckery any more, which has been wonderful.
Fastmail's web UI is clean and capable enough that I don't even use Thunderbird any more except to keep local backups of my Fastmail account reasonably current via IMAP. I regularly use the Fastmail web UI's inbuilt search to dig ancient stuff out of the archive and it works just fine.
posted by flabdablet at 8:36 AM on August 27 [2 favorites]
How would you feel about paying for an excellent service that nobody ever said would be free?
I jumped ship from Gmail to Fastmail eleven years ago. Migrating my entire Gmail archive to Fastmail using Fastmail's IMAP importer tool was straightforward. Having verified that I had all my stuff, I emptied my Gmail account and set up a forwarding rule so that everything arriving in my Gmail inbox gets a copy forwarded to my Fastmail address, then Gmail's copy marked as read and moved to Trash. So I still get mails addressed to my Gmail address but I don't have to deal with Google's commitment to random UI and account policy fuckery any more, which has been wonderful.
Fastmail's web UI is clean and capable enough that I don't even use Thunderbird any more except to keep local backups of my Fastmail account reasonably current via IMAP. I regularly use the Fastmail web UI's inbuilt search to dig ancient stuff out of the archive and it works just fine.
posted by flabdablet at 8:36 AM on August 27 [2 favorites]
I got gmail in May 2004. I agree with everyone here that you don't need to do a lot of work to bring your email down to a manageable size. For my money I think the tip about searching "unsubscribe" and deleting all of the search results, plus deleting emails above a certain filesize (after archiving), will easily get you to your desired goal in just those two steps.
I know it's super anxiety-inducing to delete emails. Especially unsorted email. Especially when you've been using gmail like a massive filing cabinet (like all the rest of us) where the junk coexists with legitimately important items. If this is your worry - that you will lose legitimately important items - you can also try to tackle the issue from the opposite end. Search for important items that may pertain to various areas of your life, bulk-mark them as "to save" and then cordon them off when you delete all the rest.
1. Search the name of every employer you have had. See if you have stored important information pertaining to these employers (e.g. the location, login and passwords of your 401K accounts with them??)
2. Search for any health records or health related paperwork. Save all the annual physical results. "explanation of benefits" can be a good search term to find insurance records.
3. In the same vein, search on the names of your doctors and medical practices you have used and any hospital names. Save any documents you've got from them.
4. Search for tax records, tax returns. I find the term "1040" to be a useful way to find this.
5. Search the word "receipt" or the phrase "thank you for your". This will get you a list of all your purchases and receipts to go along with them for warranty purposes. Also search "warranty" and "confirmation" for good measure.
6. Search for nicknames, "baby", "honey", "sweetheart", etc. to find love letters. Also of course recipient email addresses/names.
7. Search for "work order", "contract", "statement of work", "estimate", "quote", "acknowledgement", "docusign", "attest", "signature needed", and any related terms you can think of to find work that you have contracted out to others or work that you have ever been contracted to do.
8. Search "cancel" with your email in the sender field to find every cancellation of services you have ever requested.
9. In fact, go ahead and save everything you have ever sent from your email to anybody at all.
I think I've covered all possible important emails that you will need to save for future records. Suffice to say that everything else you can simply go ahead and delete off of your gmail without worries, especially if you have archived them offline.
posted by MiraK at 9:07 AM on August 27 [4 favorites]
I know it's super anxiety-inducing to delete emails. Especially unsorted email. Especially when you've been using gmail like a massive filing cabinet (like all the rest of us) where the junk coexists with legitimately important items. If this is your worry - that you will lose legitimately important items - you can also try to tackle the issue from the opposite end. Search for important items that may pertain to various areas of your life, bulk-mark them as "to save" and then cordon them off when you delete all the rest.
1. Search the name of every employer you have had. See if you have stored important information pertaining to these employers (e.g. the location, login and passwords of your 401K accounts with them??)
2. Search for any health records or health related paperwork. Save all the annual physical results. "explanation of benefits" can be a good search term to find insurance records.
3. In the same vein, search on the names of your doctors and medical practices you have used and any hospital names. Save any documents you've got from them.
4. Search for tax records, tax returns. I find the term "1040" to be a useful way to find this.
5. Search the word "receipt" or the phrase "thank you for your". This will get you a list of all your purchases and receipts to go along with them for warranty purposes. Also search "warranty" and "confirmation" for good measure.
6. Search for nicknames, "baby", "honey", "sweetheart", etc. to find love letters. Also of course recipient email addresses/names.
7. Search for "work order", "contract", "statement of work", "estimate", "quote", "acknowledgement", "docusign", "attest", "signature needed", and any related terms you can think of to find work that you have contracted out to others or work that you have ever been contracted to do.
8. Search "cancel" with your email in the sender field to find every cancellation of services you have ever requested.
9. In fact, go ahead and save everything you have ever sent from your email to anybody at all.
I think I've covered all possible important emails that you will need to save for future records. Suffice to say that everything else you can simply go ahead and delete off of your gmail without worries, especially if you have archived them offline.
posted by MiraK at 9:07 AM on August 27 [4 favorites]
Does gmail count archived email towards storage?
@theora55 Archive only removes the “Inbox” label from the chosen email.
posted by Redmond Cooper at 9:12 AM on August 27
@theora55 Archive only removes the “Inbox” label from the chosen email.
posted by Redmond Cooper at 9:12 AM on August 27
I've made good progress deleting unwanted messages by just sorting by "From:" field.
Apparently, you can set GMail to show more than 50 messages at a time.
posted by amtho at 10:02 AM on August 27 [4 favorites]
Apparently, you can set GMail to show more than 50 messages at a time.
posted by amtho at 10:02 AM on August 27 [4 favorites]
I started running out of space in GMail a few years ago, mostly due to a few bigger emails full of pictures, but also just, y'know, 20 years of random trash. And for what it's worth I did a Takeout, picked a date that would go offline only, and just deleted all mail older than that from Gmail. I used the takeout data and imported it into Apple Mail in individual annual mailboxes in the "On My Mac" location. Is it super searchable? Mmmmeh, probably not as good as it should be, but it was always sort of a slush pile anyway. And now every June or July, I declare the previous year archived and I drag the messages from my inbox into a new local folder, which seems to be working. I also started getting more aggressive about deleting trash out of my inbox. I'm sure at some point I'll regret not having the commercial emails, but in practice so many of them bitrotted into illegibility anyway that, well, no big loss.
I should see about exporting it from Apple Mail a second time and using that for good ol' grep and mutt.
posted by Kyol at 10:48 AM on August 27
I should see about exporting it from Apple Mail a second time and using that for good ol' grep and mutt.
posted by Kyol at 10:48 AM on August 27
I had this problem a few years ago. I did two things:
1. Search for everything larger than some size, and carefully prune those. There were lots of very large emails with contents I didn't actually need to keep.
2. Delete everything unread received more than 2 years. My default pattern was to just leave all of the random promotion and spam emails unread in my inbox. It's a tiny bit of a gamble, but it's very unlikely anything I actually needed to keep and hadn't open in 2 years needed to stay around.
posted by uberfunk at 1:02 PM on August 27
1. Search for everything larger than some size, and carefully prune those. There were lots of very large emails with contents I didn't actually need to keep.
2. Delete everything unread received more than 2 years. My default pattern was to just leave all of the random promotion and spam emails unread in my inbox. It's a tiny bit of a gamble, but it's very unlikely anything I actually needed to keep and hadn't open in 2 years needed to stay around.
posted by uberfunk at 1:02 PM on August 27
Seems like lots of good answers toward getting your existing mail archive sorted out. Going forward, I cannot emphasize enough how much I appreciate having my own domain, mostly for handling email. I have my primary email address, and then every time I need to sign up for something, I create a forwarder like "etsy@mydomain.com" or "homedepot@mydomain.com" that points toward my actual address. If I get spam, I can see that it's addressed to "homedepot@mydomain.com" so not only do I know who sold me out, but turning off that source of spam is as easy as deleting the appropriate forwarder. It's not for everyone, but I can't imagine not having this, now.
posted by xedrik at 1:58 PM on August 27 [2 favorites]
posted by xedrik at 1:58 PM on August 27 [2 favorites]
Hi there. macOS user, Gmail early adopter (still-in-beta account acquired in 2004 - I still have the "thanks for agreeing to help test Gmail" message), have been hit with the "you're running out of space" alert myself.
You dismissed it above but seriously, Thunderbird is your friend. It stores mail in plan text format. You can literally open your inbox or subfolders in a text editor. It can handle Gmail import and I have happily used it to move email between multiple IMAP accounts over the years. Just drag and drop. Moving mail between accounts doesn't even change the sent/received dates. (Much of what is in my Gmail account originated from my old university accounts - I just migrated it into Gmail to store it.)
It can handle large amounts of mail (for example I have one local archive folder with 17,610 emails from my wife - mail client has never had an issue with this or any other large folders, whether local or IMAP).
Spam filters are significantly better than the filters in Gmail. You can train them on known-good email. You can train them on known-spam email. It helps a lot.
Search function is way, way better than anything else I have used. The timeline view to drill down to find things? You can filter on sender, recipient, storage location, show all results threaded or unthreaded, and so on. It's one of my favorite things about Thunderbird and I truly miss it when using any other mail client. Every time I need to search my work Outlook email I get angry that Microsoft hasn't ever figured out search.
Remember that deleting things in Gmail doesn't delete them, it archives them - you won't see it unless you look in All Mail. Most mail clients don't search the All Mail folder. You can add it in Thunderbird to view contents and actually, truly delete things. This caused me no end of difficulty when my university moved to Gmail web interface only, as I handle a lot of large files in that account - multiple "Over the limit" emails but no large mail ever found, because it was "deleted" but still in my account. Without Thunderbird as a front end, I couldn't easily find and kill this mail. If you are also getting hit with this, a lot of your storage might well be crap you thought you already deleted but Gmail helpfully just hid from you. Take a look.
posted by caution live frogs at 2:19 PM on August 27 [2 favorites]
You dismissed it above but seriously, Thunderbird is your friend. It stores mail in plan text format. You can literally open your inbox or subfolders in a text editor. It can handle Gmail import and I have happily used it to move email between multiple IMAP accounts over the years. Just drag and drop. Moving mail between accounts doesn't even change the sent/received dates. (Much of what is in my Gmail account originated from my old university accounts - I just migrated it into Gmail to store it.)
It can handle large amounts of mail (for example I have one local archive folder with 17,610 emails from my wife - mail client has never had an issue with this or any other large folders, whether local or IMAP).
Spam filters are significantly better than the filters in Gmail. You can train them on known-good email. You can train them on known-spam email. It helps a lot.
Search function is way, way better than anything else I have used. The timeline view to drill down to find things? You can filter on sender, recipient, storage location, show all results threaded or unthreaded, and so on. It's one of my favorite things about Thunderbird and I truly miss it when using any other mail client. Every time I need to search my work Outlook email I get angry that Microsoft hasn't ever figured out search.
Remember that deleting things in Gmail doesn't delete them, it archives them - you won't see it unless you look in All Mail. Most mail clients don't search the All Mail folder. You can add it in Thunderbird to view contents and actually, truly delete things. This caused me no end of difficulty when my university moved to Gmail web interface only, as I handle a lot of large files in that account - multiple "Over the limit" emails but no large mail ever found, because it was "deleted" but still in my account. Without Thunderbird as a front end, I couldn't easily find and kill this mail. If you are also getting hit with this, a lot of your storage might well be crap you thought you already deleted but Gmail helpfully just hid from you. Take a look.
posted by caution live frogs at 2:19 PM on August 27 [2 favorites]
I switched from Google Workspace (Gmail) to Zoho which is absurdly cheap at $20/yr or something like that. Their automated tool imported everything perfect. My gmail likewise goes back 2 decades and I used it for my business, so migrating for me was a mission-critical thing.
posted by bradbane at 6:49 PM on August 27
posted by bradbane at 6:49 PM on August 27
for the spam, search for emails from each email address or domain and then select all and delete
if you've been getting a lot of campaign fundraisers then a lot of them will be from the same domain name
posted by Jacqueline at 12:20 AM on August 28
if you've been getting a lot of campaign fundraisers then a lot of them will be from the same domain name
posted by Jacqueline at 12:20 AM on August 28
Just here to point out that the 15 gb of storage provided in a free google account has a price of less than $1 if you put it on a single hard drive. Or to store it online with lots of replication in say Amazon S3 will run you about $6/year. I would think twice about anything that involves spending any time curating stuff to delete from that.
posted by joeyh at 7:43 PM on August 28 [1 favorite]
posted by joeyh at 7:43 PM on August 28 [1 favorite]
Like caution live frogs I was a beta invite and found Thunderbird to be a perfect solution. Cross-platform and mature. I also did a google takeout of everything just in case, then deleted about 2/3 of my email, starting with the big stuff.
Lots of copies keep stuff safe, if you really want to preserve these you want redundant backups.
I will say that as it turns out I have never actually needed to retrieve anything that I hadn’t left in Gmail.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:05 AM on August 30
Lots of copies keep stuff safe, if you really want to preserve these you want redundant backups.
I will say that as it turns out I have never actually needed to retrieve anything that I hadn’t left in Gmail.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:05 AM on August 30
Install recoll software to search your computer, including email
posted by maloqueiro at 5:15 PM on September 12
posted by maloqueiro at 5:15 PM on September 12
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posted by TimHare at 11:22 PM on August 26 [2 favorites]