a 22-year gmail cleanup

I’ve had the same Gmail account since 2004 - I was 17.

Gmail was still in beta and you needed an invite to get one - so 22 years later, my inbox had become an absolute disaster. I had over 50,000 threads - years of subscription noise, marketing emails, dead accounts from places I used to live, social media notifications I never wanted nor cared about… But buried beneath all that noise, are a handful of actual important emails I want and might actually need someday.

Every now and then I would get fed up and spend an afternoon trying to tame my inbox, I’d get it looking reasonable but it would inevitably spiral out of control again.

I’ve been having so much fun with little AI projects that are shall we say, “less than practical”, so I thought perhaps it was time to try something more practical than fun… So I set up a Google Cloud project with Gmail API access, Claude and I wrote an audit tool that pulled sender metadata - just addresses, subject lines, dates, no email content - and ranked every sender by volume.

Given the size of the backlog, I decided to work through in batches: pull the top senders, categorise them as trash, label/archive, or keep because they’re actually important. Then the script would run phase 2 to execute my categorisation in bulk via API.

Five batches later:

• 50,683 emails down to 13,000
• New filters created so new email auto routes moving forward

It’s been over a week now and my inbox is still clean, still organised. New emails are being labeled and filed correctly - no constant maintenance/grooming required from me.

22 years of chaos got completely sorted in an afternoon - blows my mind.