Discussion
yesensm: Very useful！
chris_seaman: Very cool! Congratulations on putting this together.Was also tinkering with Gmail bloat but, admittedly, with a less ambitious approach. Definitely going to give it a try.
LiamPowell: Did you really use a LLM to generate the sample output in your readme instead of just running the application? I noticed the borders were all misaligned and wondered if you had hardcoded the number of spaces, but I looked at the code and you haven't.If you did generate the output with a LLM instead of just running it... why?
guessmyname: Why thousands? You never read or delete all your emails within a day?My inbox, which I have for almost two decades only has 28 emails in it. Not 28 unread emails, but 28 total emails. I delete everything within a day of receiving, except for every important things, hence why 28 of them still remain.Keeping thousands of emails in your inbox, while virtually free, is an attack vector for hackers, and also a gold mine for advertisement brokers who pay email providers money to show you ads based on your daily habits.
CobrastanJorji: I think the idea is that SOME of the classification (the "stats" command) works without AI, but it also supports some fancy and definitely-not-local Anthropic processing options.
trustfixsec: Nice approach. Confidence scoring on what's the safe one to delete is smart, and that's the hardest part of any cleanup tool. How are you handling false positives? I've been thinking about similar confidence scoring in a different domain (security) and the calibration is really tricky when the cost of getting it wrong is high.
collabs: I am not saying I'm right, I'm just explaining how it got this bad.See I used to have 2 MB on my hot mail and 4 MB on my Yahoo! Mail. I used to do exactly what you said. Then, I got invitation to Google mail. 1GB and counting!I got lazy. I no longer had to delete mail anymore. So, it started accumulating. There. That's the whole story.
drfloyd51: 28 important emails in 20 years? Would the information in those emails had gotten to you via a different vector if you did not have email? This sounds like a case for not having email.
DigitallyBorn: I would love it if it could run against archived messages (`in:anywhere -in:trash -in:spam`) ... I've been archiving all email for a very long time and being able to run stats and purge it would do wonders.
chevuru: Happy to help with setup if anyone tries it — GCP step is the only slightly annoying part right now.
salusinarduis: I would love to use this on my iCloud mailbox. It seems odd to use the Gmail API instead of IMAP. Hopefully that becomes supported in the future because the project seems great.
kaonwarb: OP is aiming to help a quite common problem. Curious: how many others have you met with as spare of an email inbox as yours?
chevuru: Totally fair. This is probably the biggest limitation right now.I started with the Gmail API because: - better performance vs IMAP for large mailboxes - easier access to size metadata per messageThat said, IMAP support is something I definitely want to add. Especially for iCloud/Outlook users.If I did add IMAP, would you be okay with: - slower scans - slightly less accurate size estimatesOr is parity with Gmail important?
chevuru: This is a great call. you're right that a lot of the "hidden bloat" sits in archived mail, not the inbox.Right now mailtrim only looks at inbox by default, but adding support for something like: in:anywhere -in:trash -in:spam is very doable.Would you expect this as: 1) a flag (e.g. --all-mail) 2) or the default behavior?Happy to prioritize this if it's useful. Feels like it would surface way more interesting results.
