How to deal with 23,000 email messages?

leave them there. move them as you decide you need them.

When I have (rarely) wanted to shrink my emails I typically do things like select and bulk delete on sender (eg regular admin circulars from a previous job) and sort on size to get rid of the few huge ones (with ppt attachments and the like). That had a large impact for little effort.

For the most part, I don't bother, storage increases more rapidly than email IME (and filtering/searching ability also).

Most email clients allow you to set up rules and take action based on your specified criteria

Can't remember if Gmail does this natively, I think in the past I've just filtered emails > select all > delete. That's a bit laborious though.

leave them there. move them as you decide you need them.

For reasons I won't go into they can't be left or they'll all be deleted.

Filter by sender won't work as Gmail only lets you view one page at a time in the web client so it takes forever.

What would the real world impact be of a (virtual) shed fire? If you lost all of them, how would it impact you?

My default would be to delete the lot but then I am pretty liberal about these sorts of things.

Do what my boss does - delete everything on a quarterly basis

His attitude is that if it's important people will resend the memo. He's a delight to work for......

You can apply labels based on a filter using gmail. I’d do that based on whatever criteria you fancy - “keep”/“review”/“delete”?

You can use those labels to select everything with a couple of clicks.

Look for an email client that lets you access a gmail inbox. Apple’s own mail for example, however that’s a bit primitive. There are others that are similar to the original ms outlook. They give greater functionality and might even let you download the Mail box offline. Having a pc will help you in that regard I think.

write some code to do it, looks like there are python libraries for accessing gmail, I'm sure there are for other languages.

Filter by sender won’t work as Gmail only lets you view one page at a time in the web client so it takes forever.

Although you can only view a page at a time, if you're after a mass delete by sender (or some other filter) if you select all on a page it then gives you the option to select all conversations that match that search.

There’s a free mail handler program similar to the old ms outlook - someone on here will remember what it is called..

If everything is going to be deleted eventually....can you set up a rule to search for the 5% of emails you DO need, forward those to the new client, and then you don't care what happens to the Gmail inbox.

There’s a free mail handler program similar to the old ms outlook – someone on here will remember what it is called..

Thunderbird?

Use a Coral AI tensorflow thing and spend the weekend programming a model to recognise the good stuff.

can you set up a rule to search for the 5% of emails you DO need, forward those to the new client

I dunno, can I?

You can apply labels based on a filter using gmail

Maybe I can..

I am not normally in the habit of keeping emails. At work we just migrated to a new system and I am simply ignoring the decade of old work mails and abandoning them to their fate. However I ignore lots of things, and in some cases an old email from 2008 is the only link I have to something important. Like, I dunno, an e-receipt for something with a lifetime guarantee, for example.

So just download the lot using a mail client, archive it and search it as/when you need it.

Cheapest second hand laptop you can find and download them. Basic email program will have enough filtering ability to help delete the crap.
Also find a family member/friend you trust with a pc and set up guest account on theirs and do similar.

If the situation source is Gmail then you can build a filter and select to.move stuff you don't want to a folder. In the end delete the folder. Although it shows you one page there is normally a link at the top that then selects everything that matches. I often do that to remove everything after a certain date when someone's account is full

Delete all from your inbox:
- where you've been cc'd
- which haven't been opened
- which are older than an arbitrary date set by you
- where the sender is no longer part of the organisation
That should give you something more manageable to work on.
As for sent emails, only you can decide what to do.

It is not clear as to whether or not it is your personal gmail account or whether it is a suite / domain one owned by someone else.

If it is yours,(or the admin has allowed it) then takeout.google.com will allow you to export your gmail. It also allows you to select which folders/labels to export. Either select all (23000 is not that much), select some of the default ones, or do as suggested above and create your own labels.

Chapeau! I've only got 12,380 unread gmail emails.

How do you accumulate that many emails? It’s making me freak out a bit just reading the number. Then again, I delete texts, call logs, WhatsApp messages and emails on a regular basis. Have about five emails in my gmail and one of those is a train ticket for tomorrow. I’m actually impressed you have 23k.

I’d just delete the lot. With that not being an option for you I agree that downloading the lot or archiving to sort through at your convenience is probably best.

How do you find out how many emails you have in Gmail anyway?

Export the lot and deal with it once big tech finally invents a better inbox? https://takeout.google.com.

How do you accumulate that many emails?

It's the same address I've had since about 1998, and it's been a G-Suite app since 2010. Emails come, I read some, the rest of them just pile up. 12k of them are unread!

Delete the 12k unread ones first?

Filter by sender won’t work as Gmail only lets you view one page at a time in the web client so it takes forever.

It's not a page at a time unless there is only one page.  Just select all the emails using the checkbox top left.  Then at the right you get the option to 'select all conversations that match this search'

Are you migrating from Gmail to O365?  In that case you probably have Outlook already so I would connect Outlook to the google account (if not already connected) and then just download all the google account as a .pst file so you can get at your allegedly lifetime warranty emails when you need to.  Then send everything else to the bin

or this way:

Export the lot and deal with it once big tech finally invents a better inbox?  https://takeout.google.com

That also works but as far as I remember you would need an email client like Thunderbird to read the file that produces.  Outlook won't

This also assumes that your data protection rules at work allow that....

Then again, I delete texts, call logs, WhatsApp messages and emails on a regular basis.

My wife does that with email and surprise, suprise can never find information we need 🤦‍♂️ (you may be better at choosing which actually need keeping).

Is this the digital equivalent of those people you see on documentaries with newspapers piled high and corridors between… 😉

I’m the same as @funkmasterp, I delete everything I don’t need. Call logs, texts, emails,messages. Can’t handle having everything sitting there. My wife is the complete opposite!

Work emails deleted after 2 years too.

I've not done exactly this before, but similar things (programmatic manipulation of a big pile of Lots Of Things).

IME, whatever automated strategy you go for won't be very good initially and will want refinement. So you need to be able to try an approach, see how well it went, tweak it, try again, etc.

Doing this over an Internet connection will be awful, so I would:

1. Download everything to a local machine (Gmail does provide IMAP access last time I looked).

2. Implement a filtering tool using your ideas for what wants keeping. You could look at something like spamassassin, or indeed script it yourself with something like python.

3. Run the tool on a copy of.your downloaded email mountain.

4. See how it did. Good enough? Goto 5. Needs work? Goto 2.

5. Upload reduced mountain to new email service.

6. Six months later realize you missed something important and be glad.you forgot to delete the downloaded mountain.

the e in email stands for Evidence. I never delete anything manually. I have rules set to delete crap like error emails where I'm cc'ed or junkmail, but everything else gets read shortly after arrival and prioritised accordingly. That way if ever I need to say something like "ah but this is what YOU asked me to do, which is why it does that", I have an email to back me up. If you have 12k emails that you haven't even read you should have unsubscribed years ago.

anyway back on topic, gmail has filters and rules built, or you can use an 3rd party client. Thunderbird is good, I use eMClient these days

Filter by sender won’t work as Gmail only lets you view one page at a time in the web client so it takes forever.

Access them via an Outlook Client, setup a Search folder for each sender that's important (or indeed any search term, date range etc) and then move them all into a folder, delete everything else and you have your mailbox for migration.

Reminds me a bit of when Dad retired and the IT team asked if he had any personal emails he wanted to keep. He looked puzzled as he had never realised he was meant to use email. He had been on a training course about 10 years previously but thought it was pointless as he had a loud enough voice to talk to anyone in the office and a post-it note worked fine if he was out. He had 10 years of unread emails apparently.

I'd say you've got a good collection going there. Why stop now.

I mean....STAMPS ?? 🙄

Is this not what POP3 is for?

Install fat client, download the lot off the server, voila an offline archive.

I’ve got 23,000 email messages piled up in Gmail.

Eek! 😳

I got a bit bothered last week when my cumulative mail reached about 300, because I’d been a bit busy and hadn’t had chance to delete the crap!

It’s currently at 129, mostly my BT Internet account, but some gmail including my work gmail account, and a few from my .me/.iCloud account, which I keep for specific things.

The BT one I’ve had for many years, so lots of things I’ve signed up for, which much of which I ought to unsubscribe from. Inertia and bone-idleness prevents such action… 😁

My unread threshold at work is 30 before I get twitchy. Under 20 and I’m generally feeling comfortable. And I probably get 100 or so new ones a day so pretty ruthless to keep them down. On personal email it’s under 10. Always.

I realise none of that helps you OP. At 23,000 with 12,000 unread I’d have had a breakdown.

What Cougar said.

Outlook is awful and your data won't play nicely with other clients. If you install Thunderbird, allow it access in Gmail then in Thunderbird make sure you tick the box to keep offline copies so it saves everything to your disk, not just the header information.

I'd definitely cull the real chaff first to save you looking through 23,000 each time you want to find something. Gmail has an enviable set of filtering tools - date, subject, size and lots more.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en

If you have 12k unread then they are the first to go - search for is:unread and delete all.

Then delete all newsletters/automated/mailchimp, reminders and notifications.

You can use multiple search terms to find emails and conversations and move them all to a folder (you can even create the folder as you do it). Then, when you have your email client those emails will already be moved into subfolders in the account.

If you want to move any emails to the new system you can setup that account in Thunderbird and copy/move them across.

Life's too short for filing email into folders. What's the point of that? If you're looking for an old email, or some info that may be in an old email, then having to work out what folder(s) you might have shifted it into is just extra work at the other end of the process too, on top of the work of choosing a folder for it now. Or conversely, if you search across all folders, what was the point of using them?

I have 39,676 email in my inbox, apparently.

Life’s too short for filing email into folders.

Conversely, plenty of people find separating emails out can reduce the time spent searching later.

It doesn't take long to run a few finds and add labels (if it's gmail) or drag them into a folder. In gmail I have filters set to up so that many of them get labels assigned before I even see them.

If you had 39,676 letters from banks, utility companies, council, insurance companies etc etc would you put them all randomly in a single huge drawer? I wouldn't and that's the principle I apply to emails - if a small up-front effort filing reduces the time and effort spent identifying them later then it's a worthwhile step in my book.

If you had 39,676 letters from banks, utility companies, council, insurance companies etc etc would you put them all randomly in a single huge drawer?

I would if there was a way of retrieving the correct document in an instant by means of typing in a simple search.

FWIW I have various Labels automatically apply in Gmail.

In gmail use the take out option in gmail.

Use MBox to view offline when needed.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/mbox-viewer/

Back at gmail delete everthing older than say a year.

🙂

If you had 39,676 letters from banks, utility companies, council, insurance companies etc etc would you put them all randomly in a single huge drawer?

If I could instantly find anything by asking for it then yes of course I would. The reason you sort stuff is to be able to find it later, and a well indexed search does that for you so no need for folders. Google are the masters of instant searches.

I just checked and I have 45744 emails in my gmail. I agree though, why waste time filing stuff when you can just search the lot? You still end up searching anyway, just on a smaller subset of emails.

If you had 39,676 letters from banks, utility companies, council, insurance companies etc etc would you put them all randomly in a single huge drawer? I wouldn’t and that’s the principle I apply to emails

But if you could open your drawer and go "hey drawer, give me my council tax bills for the last three years" and have them magically in your hand in a split second, would you then still be fannying about administering multiple drawers? Because

if a small up-front effort filing reduces the time and effort spent identifying them

it doesn't.

As a real-world example, I just found in a few seconds the size, type and cost of pond liner that I bought an unknown number of years ago from a company whose name I couldn't remember. I didn't have to wonder about whether I had filed it with other garden stuff or receipts or arranged by year or...whatever. I can't see how folders could possibly have helped me.

Paper OTOH isn't readily searchable and requires more careful and time-consuming treatment. Which is one reason I try to avoid it.

To everyone stating the bleedin' obvious - that gmail is wonderfully searchable - yes, we know! I posted a link to the list of search operators available in gmail, FFS.

molgrips said "I now need to migrate to another system" so I believe that means moving away from gmail (and thereby losing its great search functionality).

If you think that a standard email client or set of offline files is equally capable then you may be in for a surprise.

The filing cabinet analogy was to illustrate my point that I find filing emails in folders useful, not that it is compulsory.

Just migrate them to another Gmail account then?

I do all my mail management on thunderbird, dating to well before I had always-on access... I don't use gmail web interface at all if I can avoid it. Didn't occur to me that you might need gmail's super-clever searching and filtering to just search a mailbox.