gmail-cleaner

What It Does

Deletes all messages older than a specified time from a specified Gmail label.

Installation & Setup

macOS via Homebrew

brew install cdzombak/oss/gmail-cleaner

Debian via Apt repository

Install my Debian repository if you haven't already:

sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://dist.cdzombak.net/deb.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/dist-cdzombak-net.gpg
sudo chmod 0644 /etc/apt/keyrings/dist-cdzombak-net.gpg
echo -e "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/dist-cdzombak-net.gpg] https://dist.cdzombak.net/deb/oss any oss\n" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/dist-cdzombak-net.list > /dev/null
sudo apt update

Then install gmail-cleaner via apt:

sudo apt install gmail-cleaner

Manual installation from build artifacts

Pre-built binaries for Linux and macOS on various architectures are downloadable from each GitHub Release. Debian packages for each release are available as well.

Build and install locally

git clone https://github.com/cdzombak/gmail-cleaner.git
cd gmail-cleaner
make build

cp out/gmail-cleaner $INSTALL_DIR

Gmail App Credentials

You will need to create a Google Cloud Platform project with access to the Gmail API. The easiest way to do that is Step 1 on Google's Gmail API Go Quickstart documentation page. Download the resulting credentials.json file and store it in a private gmail-cleaner configuration directory on the server you'll use to run this program.

Usage

The first time you run the program you'll have to authorize its access to your Gmail account. Therefore, test your configuration by running gmail-cleaner in an interactive shell before setting up a cronjob.

The following arguments (or their equivalent environment variables) are required:

• -configDir string: Path to a directory where credentials & user authorization tokens are stored. Overrides environment variable GMAIL_CLEANER_CONFIG_DIR.
• -label string: Label to clean (required)
• -older string: Gmail-style "older than" search string (e.g. 1y for 1 year, 3m for 3 months) (required)

To actually modify data in your Gmail account, exactly one of the following is required:

• -irreversibly-delete: Whether to irreversibly delete discovered threads. You should probably use -trash instead. By default, no data will be modified.
• -trash: Whether to trash discovered threads. By default, no data will be modified.

The following arguments are not required:

• -cap int: Cap on the number of emails to trash. If the (estimated) result count exceeds this, no data will be modified. (default 500)
• -exclude string: Additional Gmail-style search string specifying results to exclude.
• -include-spam-trash: Whether to include threads in Spam and Trash in the search.
• -help: Print help and exit.
• -version: Print the version number and exit.

Cron Example

Here's an example of running gmail-cleaner periodically via cron, adapted from my own usage:

GMAIL_CLEANER_CONFIG_DIR=/home/cdzombak/.config/gmail-cleaner
00  4  *  *  1  runner -job-name "gmail-cleaner-auto-expire-2y" -- gmail-cleaner -label "auto-expire/2 years" -older 2y -trash

This example uses my runner tool (introductory blog post) to avoid emailing me output unless something went wrong.

Docker

Docker images are available for a variety of Linux architectures from Docker Hub and GHCR. Images are based on the scratch image and are as small as possible.

Run them via, for example:

docker run --rm \
    -v /home/cdzombak/.config/gmail-cleaner:/app-config \
    cdzombak/gmail-cleaner:1 \
    -configDir /app-config \
    -label "auto-expire/2 years" \
    -older 2y \
    -trash

Keep in mind that paths given are paths _within the container, so you'll have to make sure they are mapped to the desired paths on the host.

License

GNU LGPL v3; see LICENSE in this repository.

About

• Issues: github.com/cdzombak/gmail-cleaner/issues
• Author: Chris Dzombak (GitHub @cdzombak)