GMail Clutter Finder

My GMail inbox has been filling up after being used for the past few years. I didn’t want to pay for extra storage, so I’ve been clearing out old newsletters and promotional emails to reduce clutter.

Finding the emails to delete was a pretty manual process. But I had a few hours to spare, so instead I wrote a program to find the email addresses that litter my inbox.

Download

It’s free for download here.

You’ll need to extract the program out of that zip file, and get an mbox file from your GMail account. GMail Clutter Finder will show you the email addresses that send you the most clutter, so you can easily search for them and delete them. I managed to clear my storage by a couple GB.

FAQ

Nerdy stuff

• This started off as a command line program, but I figured this could help people who didn’t know how to use the command line. So I spent a couple hours learning a few libraries to port this into a real, usable program. You know, like, with buttons.
• Since an mbox file can be huge, it’s important not to load the whole file into memory. To avoid excessive memory consumption, only one line from the mbox file is read at a time.
• A defaultdict is used to store every sender’s email count. A maxheap is then used to build a sorted list of the most common email senders, running in nlog(n) time. To relieve burden during the heapify process, only senders with an email count above a cutoff (currently 50) will be sent into the heap.
• This was my first time using a GUI library with Python and creating an exe from it. The documentation for tkinter and cx_freeze were fantastic, so learning them was much smoother than I first expected. Total development time to get a functional EXE with a GUI was about 5 hours.
• The program’s zip file is about 37MB. This is awfully large for such a small program. That’s because cx_freeze pulls the entire tkinter framework into the build. I don’t feel like fixing that right now.
• Source code is here