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

I always assumed Gmail bloat came from large attachments. Turns out 3 senders were responsible for 30% of my inbox — thousands of tiny emails I'd never thought to clean up.

  I built mailtrim to surface this pattern:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
                                           
  - ranks senders by actual storage impact (not just count)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
  - confidence scoring on what's safe to bulk-delete                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    
  - 30-day undo on everything — nothing is permanent by default
  - runs entirely locally, no email data leaves your machine   
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
  Free, open source (MIT). No subscription, no backend.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
  One friction point upfront: Gmail API setup is one-time, ~15 min.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
  After that it's just `mailtrim stats` and `mailtrim purge`.      
                                                             
  Keen to hear feedback on the confidence/safety model especially —                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
  that's the part I'm least sure I've got right.                   
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
  https://github.com/sadhgurutech/mailtrim

Curious if others have noticed the same pattern — a few senders making up most of the inbox.

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.

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.

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.