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Comment by justinator | Hacker News Reader

Anybody have luck deleting your entire Gmail inbox? I have a test account that's over it's limit, and I can't delete enough emails in a day to get it safely under. Selecting ever single email message in the inbox and then hitting the trash can just fails.

Is there an actual nuclear option?

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This might be helpful, a gist of google apps script to bulk delete email in batches.

https://gist.github.com/gene1wood/0f455239490e5342fa49

There's probably an email client that could do that. If the SMTP endpoint won't allow it there are email clients that talk the Gmail API directly.

You could probably ask ChatGPT to write a program using the Gmail API to delete all the emails in your inbox.

hn is my OG ChatGPT*. Usually I just offer a wrong answer using my spare account and someone will chime in with a better answer.

*(this post is satire)

I think you are ChatGPT﹡.

I think you posting the wrong answer is Step N-1.

Step N is when you, ChatGPT, harvest the better answer, package it, and send it to your human prompter, or to the other instance of ChatGPT that prompted you.

﹡(this post is also satire)

https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/39666358/deleting...

This might probably help. Search by largest attachments and delete so you have some buffer space. Then you can select individual emails/emails per sender and delete them all.

Delete via IMAP protocol using libraries in probability just about any programming language.

I had to deal with this a while back and I recall finding some Google scripting thing that allowed me to delete chunks of emails at a time. I don’t recall exactly what it was though :(

Yeah I've the same problem. The batch delete just doesn't work. It fails silently. You can only reliably delete the 50 emails that are visible on the page.

Can’t you set page size to 100 emails, sort on attachment size, and delete the biggest offenders?

Gmail will help you do that already. The problem isn't BIG attachments. It's 75,000 messages received that are all pretty small.

The Google apps script is probably the way to go. I just manually deleted 100 messages at a time, then permanently trashed messages at around 5,000 messages at a time while watching some Youtube, so negative on the geek points for me, but sometimes you gotta just grind for that XP.

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