Show HN: Inbox Cleanup – get to inbox zero in Gmail | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Inbox Cleanup – get to inbox zero in Gmail

cleanup.upstream.do

3 pointsjtiret2 comments

We've been working on a small tool that can help with huge (or really, any size) Gmail inboxes. It's meant for people who have let their inbox grow for years and don't know where to start.

We had this idea after talking to a lot of people about how they use their email, and one thing that kept coming up was how hard it is to keep up when you receive a lot of emails. Things pile up and cleaning up starts to feel impossible.

One important detail: the tool never performs any destructive operations on your email. The most it can do to a message is archive it (move it to the All Mail folder), where it stays available for search, so you never lose any messages as a result.

It combines multiple approaches to inbox cleanup: - You choose a cutoff date to archive everything before that - With some help from OpenAI, we find other groups of emails you may want to archive - We detect newsletters you rarely open and let you unsubscribe in one click - For transactional emails you rarely open (e.g. tool notifications), we suggest filters that skip the inbox and keep them under a label instead

At the end, you can undo all the inbox changes you made.

Gmail API calls happen client-side. Also, your messages and contacts are not stored on our servers. Some message metadata and snippets are sent to OpenAI to help with categorization.

Curious how many of you actually use inbox zero, or have considered trying it?

Happy to get your feedback.

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Interesting tool. I've seen this done with an agent and google workspace CLI.

I like the idea of being able to bulk assign labels before a cutoff and the other Gmail API driven stuff, but the AI work is a bit unclear.

"Some message metadata and snippets", what exactly does that entail? Partial message bodies?

Handing over email access, however limited, to a 3rd party wigs me out. Would you consider a runnable local tool instead of a hosted service? Or a bring-your-own-keys system??

I realise people are pretty cavalier and integrating their Google Accounts with ChatGPT desktop anyway, so maybe it doesn't bother many people.

Does your OpenAI API account have zero data retention mode?

Good questions!

For some AI steps, we send sender/recipient information, subjects and truncated message bodies from a sample of messages (typically between 100 and 300 depending on the step). For instance we use that to find additional groups of emails to archive, suggest filters to skip the inbox and move messages under a label or identify newsletters.

A local tool/BYOK version could definitely make sense. We didn't really consider it initially because we built the tool around a mostly client-side architecture: Gmail API calls happen client-side

The recent "Sign in with ChatGPT" announcement also looks interesting here. In theory we could keep the tool working pretty much as it does today, but let users connect their own ChatGPT account and use their plan for the AI requests instead of us making those requests through our API account. We haven't looked deeply into it yet though.

We don't currently have "zero data retention" enabled. We're using the standard OpenAI API setup, so inputs/outputs may be retained for up to 30 days (for abuse monitoring, and API data isn't used for training by default)

That's a good point though and definitely something we should consider. In your case, would zdr be enough to make you comfortable using something like this, or would you really want it to be local/BYOK?

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