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

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

#11

Post by CobrastanJorji »

LiamPowell wrote: post #6

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 n…

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.

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

#12

Post by kaonwarb »

guessmyname wrote: post #5

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…

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?

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

#13

Post by salusinarduis »

chevuru wrote: post #2

Happy to help with setup if anyone tries it — GCP step is the only slightly annoying part right now.

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.

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

#16

Post by chevuru »

DigitallyBorn wrote: post #14

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.

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.

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

#17

Post by chevuru »

salusinarduis wrote: post #13
chevuru wrote: post #2

Happy to help with setup if anyone tries it — GCP step is the only slightly annoying part right now.

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.

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 message

That 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 estimates

Or is parity with Gmail important?

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

#18

Post by chevuru »

trustfixsec wrote: post #10

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.

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

#19

Post by chevuru »

LiamPowell wrote: post #6

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 n…

[dead]

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

#20

Post by chevuru »

guessmyname wrote: post #5

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…

[dead]
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