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

29•chevuru•7h ago

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

Comments

chevuru•7h ago

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

salusinarduis•6h 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.

chevuru•21m 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?

chevuru•7h ago

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

yesensm•7h ago

Very useful！

guessmyname•6h 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.

drfloyd51•6h 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.

collabs•6h 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.

kaonwarb•6h 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?

LiamPowell•6h 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.

CobrastanJorji•6h 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.

chris_seaman•6h 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.

trustfixsec•6h 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.

DigitallyBorn•6h 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.

chevuru•22m 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.

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