Ask HN: How to mine my inbox.

1 points by jman1 13 years ago | 3 comments

I use gmail and over the years have accumulated a lot of mails. Some that I'd like to keep and some that I'd like to get rid off. The Issue is that I have about 5000 emails and going one by one is not an option. I would like to know if there are any tools that will allow me to mine my inbox orif there is a better way to deal with the problem of having a big inbox, because if the size of the inbox keeps growing it just becomes "noise" and from that point forward having or not having that data(email) is the same.

cstrat 13 years ago |

You can use the filter tool to sequentially use rules to apply labels to emails from certain senders. Having labels makes searching/sorting much easier.

jman1 13 years ago | |

Any suggestions on how I can get a list of distinct email addresses from which I have received emails ? Kinda like a select distinct on db table ?

hakaaak 13 years ago | | |

Exporting and importing contacts as csv: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

You could then manipulate that file to hand remove duplicates, could use A2=A1 type formula in a spreadsheet and fill down to find dupes, copy relevant column to text file and sort and uniq in *nix: http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl1_uniq.htm

Merging and mass merging Gmail contacts: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

You could also use Thunderbird. A few t-bird plugins will let you do things like remove dupes and sync with Gmail.

As for cleaning your inbox though, I would see this as an opportunity to write a script in Ruby that uses IMAP to automate your scrape and purge: http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/net/imap/rdoc/Ne... Or whatever other language you'd like to use. I just like Ruby, but since it might involve a lot of text parsing, maybe Perl would be a good choice: http://search.cpan.org/~djkernen/Mail-IMAPClient/IMAPClient....

And then GPLv3 your script, put it on GitHub, use a default GitHub template to create a nice looking site for it, and post the link back to HN with the cool doc saying how to use it.