October 6, 2018

[Ask IH] Would my email deletion and management tool be useful?

Hello! I've been working on a side project which I find incredibly useful for myself, and am interested in feedback for whether you would also find it useful.

I had a problem where whenever I searched for something in Gmail, most of the results that came up were from mailing lists, solicitations, or automated alerts. There was no way to exclude these categories from search, so I decided to write a little GUI to "analyze" my inbox and let me one-click delete messages in batch.

This is what it looks like: https://imgur.com/a/1E6LTHi

I spent a lot of time figuring out how to make it work seamlessly - within gmail's API rate limits, and how to handle a volume of messages to process.

My question is: would this kind of tool be useful to anyone else? If so, what features would make it so? I want to implement:

  • Automatically categorize/label emails with more flexibility than filters

  • Automatically delete automated messages after, say, 30 days to reduce clutter

  • Possibly try to improve search - though I don't have a clear idea of how I want it to be better

The biggest challenge I see is how to establish trust.

Any thoughts or suggestions? What would make this kind of thing useful? Happy to share a URL for my rough prototype for feedback too!


  1. 1

    I think there's an opportunity for better search in Gmail, and perhaps for better categorization/labeling scripts. For a company whose bread and butter is search, Gmail search sucks.

    But...I probably wouldn't pay for just better Gmail search. It's just not that big of a problem in my life.