How to Delete Gmail Attachments Without Deleting the Emails
blog.unattach.app
blog.unattach.app
Works with gmail, too - assuming you've jumped through the necessary hoops to enable full read-write IMAP access to your account.
Edit: Hoops are:
- Gmail Settings > Enable IMAP
- Gmail Settings > Auto-Expunge: off
- Gmail Settings > When a message is marked as deleted and expunged from the last visible IMAP folder: Immediately delete the message forever
- Gmail Settings > Folder size limits: Do not limit
- Account Settings > Secutiry > Signing in > App password > (create one)
People are willing to pay for convenience. Your mutt isn’t going to automatically find all large attachment, downsize them or handle inline images, but you didn’t read the article so you wouldn’t know that.
Removing attachments is a standard feature of just about any email client, even extremely barebones/cli ones. That was the point. Yet, Gmail is lacks this convenience. Are you seriously arguing that none wants Gmail?
No, across many emails, at least not without writing some macros.
Sort-of, labeling deleted attachment. You can attach a label to whole email, or edit raw, to edit/replace an attachment with placeholder/label text. A bit fiddly, but doable with some vim-fu.
That's a "feature" of gmail's IMAP server that is easy to confuse for a client bug - see pugio's comment about having exact same problem when using Thunderbird.
Gmail knows nothing about folders (where given email is in exactly one of those), instead using "labels" (which an email can have zero or more of). Problematic "feature" here is that their IMAP interface exposes labels as folders. So, if client asks server to delete message from given folder, instead gmail removes label with that name (then adds "Archive" label, to confuse thing just that little bit more)
Luckily, there is an obscure "When a message is marked as deleted and expunged from the last visible IMAP folder" option to rectify this intentional defect.
Mu/mu4e: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/23812/remove-attac...
Thunderbird: https://www.datarecovery.institute/remove-attachments-from-t...
Google have made the process of paying for storage (for me) so miserable that I would consider this. A stop gap until I ditch google altogether.
Nor sure it will scale though.
Regarding scale, practically all of the work is done within the user's browser; the server is used only for downloading the app, auth, admin and metrics.
Plus it’s more likely that one would pay $10, clean up the inbox and move on, compared to $25 yearly forever.
Honestly, I think this is just very different markets. With piracy (esp. of movies), you simply get a better product than if you don't use piracy: you can get stuff outside your market, you can get subtitles you don't get with your normal streaming service, you don't need to subscribe to 12 different services at once, you don't have to worry about not being able to watch a movie because your internet connection is down, you don't have to watch a bunch of ads, etc. Piracy isn't just about saving money.
> ut not being able to watch a movie because your internet connection is down
Some services allow you to download movies beforehand just like you would have to do with pirated movies.
No, if you're not in the right region, a lot of stuff is simply unavailable to you at any price, or it's not available in your language. For instance, if you're in America, even if something is available, it's been converted into English so you can't watch it in the original language.
It doesn't matter how much money you have, unless you're talking about flying a private jet to that region which is just ridiculous.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but doesn't this open up the ability alter e-mail history at will? And so alter e-mails you'd received and/or sent?
Is there a record of this somewhere? What effect does this have on using e-mails as evidence in court cases, for example? Or is there a technical detail that necessarily gives this away?
Yes. It should invalidate the DKIM signature though, which mainstream servers add to each email now. So it's possible to prove the contents of that email haven't been tampered with... assuming you have a record of the sending domain's public DKIM key. I imagine your email provider would have logs indicating you modified an email too, but I have no evidence of this, nor how eagerly they would dig up such logs for a court if they have any.
I have no idea how people deal with this in practice in court. (What if the domain's DKIM key has changed? Is there an authoritative source of old DKIM keys for most domains?)
And, in the minority of cases where it really matters, and where they really suspect foul play, them I'd assume that they rely on numerous bits of technical evidence (proxy copies, CC'ed copies, file system forensics), plus on one person's testimony vs another's, because as you say, DKIM's usefulness is limited.
There isn't. As per the article, the application creates a copy of the original email, sans the attachment, then deletes the original.
IDK if it supports in-place quality reduction though.
Switch to the featured app here and everything worked seamlessly. Definitely worth it, as this way I don't have to pay for Google storage and can clean out a bunch of pure junk from my emails.
As saying goes, it's not a bug, it a feature. You can disable it by setting following gmail options:
- Auto-Expunge: off
- When a message is marked as deleted and expunged from the last visible IMAP folder: Immediately delete the message forever
On your blog, as it's obvious you're the creator of the tool, I think it would go over better if you said something like:
'Fortunately, I've created a web app called Unattach that solves this use case.'
Also, please consider left aligning your text as dyslexic people struggle with justified copy.
Thanks! If you give it a try, I'd be interested to hear your feedback.
> 'Fortunately, I've created a web app called Unattach that solves this use case.'
I actually had this exact phrasing in the draft version of the blog post, but was advised by some against using it, because "it's standard practice not to include attribution on these types of blog posts." I've now added it back.
> Also, please consider left aligning your text as dyslexic people struggle with justified copy.
Ah, I wasn't aware of this. Just changed the whole blog post to left aligned.
Havent used it in awhile so not sure if anything changed
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46434390/remove-an-attac...
I hate to say this but Outlook actually works best for me for keeping my email account to a sensible size. I use a simple VB script that I trigger with a keyboard shortcut which strips all attachments from a mail but adds the filenames of the attachments stripped at the top of the mail ("Attachment(s) removed: <file1>, <file2>, ..."). Very useful to keeping track of what was actually sent.
The other things that Outlook does really well is converting pesky HTML mails to plain text. I don't mean to just display them as plain text, but actually convert them to plain text, scrubbing all that superfluous HTML nonsense. Just open a mail, edit, format as plain text, save. I would love to find another (FLOSS) client that can do this as easily/efficiently.
I keep all old mails (that are not spam or otherwise superfluous) in a folder in my account (not Gmail, but the same principle) and can always quickly refer back to them. 100,000s of mails over 18 years barely make a dent in my allowance -- just about a GB out of 10 GB. At that rate, I won't run out of space with this workflow before I kick the bucket.
I hope there is a big warning when using the app, because this makes these emails (maybe even the whole conversation chain?) wortheless should they be needed as some kind of legal evidence.
IMAP is really kinda a object store, where the objects are emails. Modify emails stored remotely is already extremely trivial.
DKIM and ARC make this a bit more secure, but they are the only way to validate an email is authentic.
DKIM key rotation with providers like AWS SES and others, after a period of time it is impossible to validate old emails as authentic. For SES it takes only 9 months for that to happen.
The provider has no reason to keep either the public or private key either.
Of course you would need multiple trusted sources for the key to have confidence that the mail is legit.
Frustratingly, Exchange breaks this possibility immediately, because it decomposes the email into components. It does preserve and validate some fancier signature schemes, but those are rarely used and have their own problems.
The web app needs write permissions to the user’s Gmail account. In such cases, Google requires the author to explain how the permissions are used, submit a video showing this, and ideally to have a reference from someone working at Google.
Also I might be wrong but one major issue I’m having is the lack of deduplication. I sent a video once and then we talked about it for a few hundred emails and all of a sudden I had used up gigabytes of my google cloud storage.
> we can see the message “1 deleted message in this conversation. View message or delete forever.” at the bottom. By default, Unattach puts the original email (the one with attachments) into Gmail’s Bin.