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

34 pointschevuru1mo ago22 comments

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

22 comments

DigitallyBorn1mo ago

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.

chevuruOP1mo ago

Now shipped: --scope anywhere is now live — scans all mail (inbox, archived, sent), not just inbox. Works with stats, purge, and sync. Thanks for the push

chevuruOP1mo ago

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.

fsflyer1mo ago

I'd like an option to run against a local ollama server, that would give folks an option to keep this completely local.

For me, it seems to be quite a few senders that fill my inbox. running

``` mailtrim purge ```

only finds about 200 MB of purge suggestions with a mailbox of 15GB, but deleting a few and running again finds a few more.

Gmail does some classification, it might be useful to have scopes that match those: promotions, updates, social and forums.

IMAP support would be useful for a yahoo account even if it's slower/less accurate. This is better than manual cleanup.

chevuruOP1mo ago

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

salusinarduis1mo ago

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.

chevuruOP1mo ago

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?

chevuruOP1mo ago

Live on Pypi

https://pypi.org/project/mailtrim/

chris_seaman1mo ago

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.

chevuruOP1mo ago

Thanks! The Gmail API setup is the only friction. Once Mailtrim auth completes, it's just two commands. Let me know if you hit anything.

guessmyname1mo ago

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.

collabs1mo ago

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.

drfloyd511mo ago

28 important emails in 20 years? Would the information in those emails had gotten to you via a different vector if you did not have email? This sounds like a case for not having email.

kaonwarb1mo ago

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?

LiamPowell1mo ago

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 never leave your machine.

How can both of these things be true? How can Claude be used as a classifier without sending your emails to Claude? From looking at the code it appears that you do in fact just send off emails to Claude, or at least the first 300-400 characters, so that line is just a complete lie.

chevuruOP1mo ago

The share text and README have been updated to accurately say "Core cleanup runs locally — AI commands send only subjects/snippets to Anthropic." The terminal sample outputs were illustrative; I'm recording a real asciinema session to replace them. PR #8 landed the README fix

CobrastanJorji1mo ago

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.

Driver47321mo ago

Very cool. I need to clean up email as I'm nearing the storage limit of a free gmail account.

chevuruOP1mo ago

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

adam-badar1mo ago

curious how you handle the volume - for heavy users with 50k+ emails, are you processing everything client-side or hitting the gmail api for each message?

1 more reply

yesensm1mo ago

Very useful！

trustfixsec1mo ago

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.

1 more reply

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22 comments

DigitallyBorn1mo ago

chevuruOP1mo ago

Now shipped: --scope anywhere is now live — scans all mail (inbox, archived, sent), not just inbox. Works with stats, purge, and sync. Thanks for the push

chevuruOP1mo ago

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.

fsflyer1mo ago

I'd like an option to run against a local ollama server, that would give folks an option to keep this completely local.

For me, it seems to be quite a few senders that fill my inbox. running

``` mailtrim purge ```

only finds about 200 MB of purge suggestions with a mailbox of 15GB, but deleting a few and running again finds a few more.

Gmail does some classification, it might be useful to have scopes that match those: promotions, updates, social and forums.

IMAP support would be useful for a yahoo account even if it's slower/less accurate. This is better than manual cleanup.

chevuruOP1mo ago

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

salusinarduis1mo ago

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.

chevuruOP1mo ago

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?

chevuruOP1mo ago

Live on Pypi

https://pypi.org/project/mailtrim/

chris_seaman1mo ago

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.

chevuruOP1mo ago

Thanks! The Gmail API setup is the only friction. Once Mailtrim auth completes, it's just two commands. Let me know if you hit anything.

guessmyname1mo ago

Why thousands? You never read or delete all your emails within a day?

collabs1mo ago

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.

drfloyd511mo ago

28 important emails in 20 years? Would the information in those emails had gotten to you via a different vector if you did not have email? This sounds like a case for not having email.

kaonwarb1mo ago

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?

LiamPowell1mo ago

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 never leave your machine.

chevuruOP1mo ago

CobrastanJorji1mo ago

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.

Driver47321mo ago

Very cool. I need to clean up email as I'm nearing the storage limit of a free gmail account.

chevuruOP1mo ago

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

adam-badar1mo ago

curious how you handle the volume - for heavy users with 50k+ emails, are you processing everything client-side or hitting the gmail api for each message?

1 more reply

yesensm1mo ago

Very useful！

trustfixsec1mo ago

1 more reply

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