Show HN: mailtrim – find what's actually filling your Gmail inbox

by chevuru 22 comments 34 points
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22 comments

[−] DigitallyBorn 41d ago
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 40d ago
Now shipped: --scope anywhere is now live — scans all mail (inbox, archived, sent), not just inbox. Works with stats, purge, and sync. Thanks for the push
[−] chevuru 40d ago
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.

[−] fsflyer 40d ago
I'd like an option to run against a local ollama server, that would give folks an option to keep this completely local.

For me, it seems to be quite a few senders that fill my inbox. running

`` mailtrim purge ``

only finds about 200 MB of purge suggestions with a mailbox of 15GB, but deleting a few and running again finds a few more.

Gmail does some classification, it might be useful to have scopes that match those: promotions, updates, social and forums.

IMAP support would be useful for a yahoo account even if it's slower/less accurate. This is better than manual cleanup.

[−] chevuru 41d ago
Happy to help with setup if anyone tries it — GCP step is the only slightly annoying part right now.
[−] chevuru 40d ago
[−] chris_seaman 41d ago
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.

[−] guessmyname 41d ago
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.

[−] LiamPowell 41d ago
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?

Also:

> It uses Claude AI for smart classification, but runs entirely locally: your emails never leave your machine.

How can both of these things be true? How can Claude be used as a classifier without sending your emails to Claude? From looking at the code it appears that you do in fact just send off emails to Claude, or at least the first 300-400 characters, so that line is just a complete lie.

[−] Driver4732 40d ago
Very cool. I need to clean up email as I'm nearing the storage limit of a free gmail account.
[−] chevuru 41d ago
Curious if others have noticed the same pattern — a few senders making up most of the inbox.
[−] adam-badar 40d ago
curious how you handle the volume - for heavy users with 50k+ emails, are you processing everything client-side or hitting the gmail api for each message?
[−] yesensm 41d ago
Very useful!
[−] trustfixsec 41d ago
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.
[−] johnwhitman 40d ago
[flagged]
[−] chevuru 40d ago
[dead]