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Gmail Annoyances
Searching your gmail
Maybe your account is getting too close to filling and you want to search and delete messages smartly.
Note that if you delete them, they're not removed from your gmail space until you empty the trash. So the sequence of actions could be:
- Search for large emails, those from certain addresses, etc, and delete all of them.
- Empty trash.
gmail search command | explanation |
---|---|
alphabet | find all mail with the word “alphabet” in it. Also finds those with “alphabets”. |
from:george | find all mail from this person |
to:martha | |
subject:dinner | |
OR | From:george OR from:martha |
label:Adverts | |
has:attachment | |
“exact phrase” | |
in:anywhere | Anywhere in gmail |
in:inbox in:trash in:spam in:sent | |
is:starred is:unread is:read | |
after:2004/04/16 before:2004/04/16 | Msgs sent after midnight 4/16/2004 and before the start of 4/18/2004 |
newer_than:2d older_than | newer_than:2d means, Messages sent within the last 2 days d (day), m (month), y (year) |
size:10M | All messages of at least 10MB in size |
+unicorn | Finds words matching unicorn exactly – not different forms like “unicorns” or misspelled “unicron” |
Examples
in:adverts older_than:10d | all mail in the “adverts” folder older than 10 days |
from:costco@online.costco.com size:5M | all mail from that address 5MB or larger in size |
in:sent before:2020/09/15 after:2020/09/13 | all mail that you sent in that time period, midnight on 9/13 to maybe a message on 9/16 |
Offload messages from gMail
Suggestions from a thread on/about 19may2021.
MacOS
Depending on the size of the mailbox, you may be able to accomplish this all with just drag-n-drop, but there are some powerful apps for Mac OS that support this kind of task, for example:
https://mailsteward.com/index.html | MailSteward |
https://www.mothsoftware.com/index.php | Mail Archiver X |
https://thehorcrux.com/ | Horcrux |
https://c-command.com/eaglefiler/ | EagleFiler |
FWIW, there are a lot of reasons one might want to do a bulk download/archive of an email account, the most basic being the security of having a local backup copy. Others may just want to escape Google. And for people with super large email accounts (> 2 million saved emails), it becomes increasingly important to shunt older email into secondary storage just to keep an email client from collapsing under the load.
Glenn P. Parker
lifewire
I successfully downloaded 15GB of gmail (everything through the end of 2020) with these instructions:
https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-export-your-emails-from-gmail-as-mbox-files-1171881
It went smoothly, and I can download more as I go along, and it should stay all in order.
I also successfully tried out the mail client claws-mail, with which I can read and search my now-downloaded mbox files.
https://www.claws-mail.org
As far as I know you can also send mail using claws-mail, though that's not how I'm planning to use it.
I created an account with a different mail provider.
Once I get myself all the way off of gmail, I can send and receive mail on that account
and stay under the tiny quota by routinely (weekly?) downloading received mail into mbox files on my own computer,
reading/searching these archives with claws-mail.
J Tang