Interesting! I already have a Python script that can download anything from Gmail. Making it a product?! Really have not thought about it! Which is why I am probably broke Ha Ha
Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
31–40 of 71 posts
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
My question is why not use IMAP?
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 Gmail API because of platform gatekeeping. To use the API for this, Google forces independent developers into a "Restricted Scope" tier, which requires an annual $15,000+ third-party security assessment. Going the local IMAP route lets me bypas…
I don't like how somebody is flagging/downvoting all your comments. This is about your product; it's highly relevant, whatever somebody might think about it.
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#33I'd love to somehow do the opposite of this but I don't think it's possible? It would be deleting attachments from emails without deleting the email thread.
For example I'm always 1-2 GB away from my Google account being full. I've pruned Google Drive to the absolute bare minimum.
I've had my Google account for a really long time. There's tens of thousands of emails since day 1. However, there's many emails that have attachments.
For example my friends or someone might have sent me a bunch of images and there's a very long email thread going on with them. I want to delete the 300 MB of photos without deleting the email thread. I don't think Google has a way to do this. I'd easily be able to free up multiple gigs of space if this were possible.
I've already bit the bullet and deleted the biggest offenders but I have a ton of emails with 1-2 attachments (pdfs, zip files, some images, etc.) that might "only" be 15 MB but I definitely don't want to delete the email since it has a record of something. Not just the attachment but the corresponding email chain.
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#34I'd love to somehow do the opposite of this but I don't think it's possible? It would be deleting attachments from emails without deleting the email thread. For example I'm always 1-2 GB away from my Google account being full. I've pruned Google Drive to the absolute bare minimum. I've had my Google account for a really long time. There's tens of thousands of emails since day 1. However, there's many emails that have…
I have the same issue and found this worked great https://unattach.com/ (no affiliation, just a user)
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 instead of designing custom CSS layouts from scratch. I'll finesse the design in the future.
> 98% of my time went into wrestling with IMAP parsing architectures, optimizing memory, and code-signing certificates instead of designing custom CSS layouts from scratch You're just using imapflow and their Gmail search method. Why are you making things up? https://imapflow.com/docs/guides/fetching-messages#gmail-spe... You call that function with this query over and over again: filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR png OR gif…
[flagged]
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#36Or you can just use Google Takeout: https://takeout.google.com Deselect everything, select "Mail", create export, wait until it's done, and then download the zip.
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 entire history into a huge .mbox file. If you have a 20-year-old account, you're downloading tens of gigabytes of raw text data, headers, and metadata just to get to the images. Once you have that huge file, you still have to figure out a wa…
This script will extract all of the attachments from a MBOX file - https://gist.github.com/georgy7/3a80bce2cd8bf2f9985c
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#37For $30 you should sign your binary so you don't have a UAC popup. Also is it not doable with Google takeout ( with Gmail )?
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Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Gmail API because of platform gatekeeping. To use the API for this, Google forces independent developers into a "Restricted Scope" tier, which requires an annual $15,000+ third-party security assessment. Going the local IMAP route lets me bypas…
I don't like how somebody is flagging/downvoting all your comments. This is about your product; it's highly relevant, whatever somebody might think about it.
I don't think it's just "somebody"; I think it's a lot of bodies. I'm downvoting him too because he vibe-coded a super simple "app", then is trying to sell it here as some life-saving tool .
My main complaints:
- Why is this $30?
- Why is it Windows/Mac only?
- Why is it Gmail only when it's using IMAP?
But what really irks me is that you know you can do this exact thing with like two Linux CLI commands?
```
$ offlineimap -c
$ mae export --maildir=test/fixtures/simple --output-dir=test/tmp_output
```
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#39“I found photos of my niece I thought were lost forever. Thank you so much!” Emily D. Be honest, is "Emily D" a real person you got organic feedback from? Small thing that makes the vibed site off-putting. It says "Storage: 1.3 GB saved", but then says it is Read-only.
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.
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#40I'd love to somehow do the opposite of this but I don't think it's possible? It would be deleting attachments from emails without deleting the email thread. For example I'm always 1-2 GB away from my Google account being full. I've pruned Google Drive to the absolute bare minimum. I've had my Google account for a really long time. There's tens of thousands of emails since day 1. However, there's many emails that have…
I have the same issue and found this worked great https://unattach.com/ (no affiliation, just a user)
Oh nice, if everything they say is true, this seems like a good match but it seems like it has 1 big potential downside.
THE GOOD:
Their FAQ says it uses OAuth to connect to your Google account and the emails never leave your browser.
It also costs 83 cents for 1 month so you can go nuts. Alternatively you can pay 1 cent per email if you have a handful.
I see another HN thread about it here from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32462878
THE BAD:
I don't know if it can be used with total confidence because that HN thread makes it sound like they delete the original email and create a new email with the same meta data but some of the comments indicate that's not quite the same as the original. If you had to present this email as evidence, you could run into friction since the original no longer exists. Technically it looks like you can back the original up but as someone mentioned in a comment that seems like it would add a lot of friction in a legal case.
I have no intent on ever needing to use old emails with large attachments in a legal case but knowing this could be a problem makes me hesitant. Although on the bright side, it would be fine to use for anything you 100% know won't ever be used legally.