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Email Purge Assistant

Authors
  • avatar
    Name
    Robert Claus
    Twitter

If your Gmail inbox is a mess and/or you're constantly running out of storage, check out this simple utility I wrote for identifying clean-up opportunities like high volume junk senders or unusually large emails: https://email-purge-assistant.robertclaus.com/

(Note, I'm still in the process of app verification with Google, so you may need to go into the "Advanced" link while authorizing the app.)

Here's the story behind it: Over the last few years I had developed an odd personal email management habit where I left everything in my inbox and scrolled through to find relevant emails. Mostly I had just gotten sick of clicking through the high volume of junk I received. This December, I finally got around to cleaning this up.

In about 2 weeks I've managed to go from 50+ junk emails per day down to <5. I also managed to clear ~20% of my Gmail storage with a few clicks. Turns out this is pretty straight forward with the right tools.

Here's what I did:

  1. I disabled Gmail's automatic sorting into "Promotional", "Social", and "Inbox" since that was hiding a TON of junk emails from me.
  2. I marked all my historical emails as "Read" and "Archived". This wasn't too bad in Gmail using the "Select All" feature. This set the expectation for myself that all future emails would be acted on rather than just leaving junk untouched.
  3. I used my new web utility (https://email-purge-assistant.robertclaus.com/) to identify senders that sent me high volume junk emails. I unsubscribed from those and deleted all of them to free up space. Turns out a few senders sending junk emails every day for years added up to most of Gmail's free storage tier.
  4. I used the utility to identify large one-off emails taking up unnecessary space. Most of these were actually one-off files I sent myself to transfer them between my phone and laptop, so I was able to easily delete them.
  5. For two weeks I was super studious hitting the "Unsubscribe" link on every new email that came in. For me that was hundreds of emails. For many companies I had to unsubscribe multiple times.

If you find the utility useful let me know! Feel free to submit any requests for other stats or features on Github (https://github.com/robertclaus/gmail-purge-assistant) and I'll add them!