Viewing profile — ltiger

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Thanks so much! Definitely a trial by fire, but I'm glad I put it out here. 'Preciate the kind words.

Nah, but thanks. I actually spent a lot of time checking out Takeout, shell scripts, and existing options before writing a single line of code for the app. Non-technical users don'…

Clever. But Gmail and Google Drive share the exact same 15 gb storage quota. If a user has 10 gigs of photos in their Gmail and runs this script, it'll create another 10 gb of file…

Just wanted to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who commented today. Launching on HN isn't for the faint of heart, but it’s been really valuable. What a day. I was told m…

You're half right. The HTML and CSS are from a standard template that I imagine exists in just about every LLM's dataset, since they've scraped an internet's worth of them. I wrote…

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Just pushed an update to the site around this. Changing the text to "Downloaded" still might confuse someone, so I removed that line from the illustration altogether.

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Nah, don't do that. Totally fair, though. In my defense, 98% of my time went into wrestling with IMAP parsing architectures, optimizing memory, and code-signing certificates instea…

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Thanks, that means a lot. I rebuilt the app because I was feeling that same fatigue. It felt like every cool new tool I looked at wanted to upload personal data to a remote server,…

No, I'm not afraid of pushback at all. I'm actually really glad I used IMAP. Building on top of it let me solve a few major protocol headaches directly in the client: The app filte…

Thanks!

Thanks! Yes, use Google Takeout if you want a full account archive. It's a pain if you just want to get your photos, though. You have to deal with huge .mbox files, download gigaby…

It actually does use IMAP! The app connects directly to Google's IMAP servers via SSL straight from your machine. I intentionally chose a local IMAP pipeline over the official Gmai…

Takeout is great for a total archive backup, but using it just to extract photos is where the UX breaks down for most people. When you export Mail with Takeout, Google dumps your e…

Thanks for the feedback! You're right, if you know how to write a script or prompt Claude, you can absolutely spin up a quick tool to scrape attachments in a few minutes. That said…

Hey HN, I’m the creator of Mail Memories. Like many of you, I've had my Gmail address for more than 20 years. A few years ago, I got curious and wanted to see what photos were buri…

TL;DR: Mail Memories is a local-first desktop app (Mac/Windows) that extracts forgotten photos from your Gmail history. 100% local processing, zero cloud servers, no subscriptions,…