Clean my giant inbox by sender — trash only, never delete, undo everything
Dheeraj Sharma built an AI cleanup agent for decade-old Gmail inboxes like a reader's 130,000-message one, then ran it on his own 7,610-message mailbox in four gated stages: census, editable plan, dry run, apply. One approved run moved 2,896 newsletter and notification emails to Trash in 107 seconds (unread fell from 5,013 to 2,237), with deletion impossible by design and every change logged for a one-command undo.
How it works
- Census: sample the newest 2,000 messages, roll senders up to domains, count each exactly with cheap ID-only queries
- Plan: The AI drafts keep/trash/archive/label/unsubscribe per sender with reasons; he edits it and switches every unsubscribe to no
- Dry run: shows exactly how many messages each plan line would move, changes nothing
- Apply on his go: 2,896 messages moved to Trash in 107 seconds, all logged first
- Undo available as one command, restoring exact labels; safety suite of 54 checks guards trash-only, no-delete permission and starred/important exclusions
Why it’s worth knowing
It cleared 2,896 emails in 107 seconds while being technically incapable of deleting anything — the safety is in the permissions, not the prompt.
Where it’s from
Summarized from a public post on genaiunplugged.substack.com. See the original ↗