Purge your gmail inbox with this python script

My gmail inbox is full. Cleansing almost 400k of emails from my inbox manually is impossible, so I decided to put into usage a very useful Python script which I found on Github after hours of research.

Being able to run the script in the background, I managed to cleanse almost 22k emails in a 4 hours period of time. Although not the best tool available, the fact it is open source and free, makes it the best option for my own case.

Download the tool from Github

Make use of the following command to download the source code from the official repository.

git clone https://github.com/marin117/Gmail-deleter.git

How to setup the script on your own machine

Having tested the tool with Python 2.7, I have come to the conclusion that such version of Python is the right one for setting up the environment. As for the dependencies, a virtual environment is required. The following command can help you to setup a fresh virtual environment inside the project's root.

virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python env
source env/bin/activate

Then install the requirements with the help of the following command.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Once you have managed to successfully install the requirements on your own machine, then comment the following lines.

#import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # on google_client.py
#import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # on gmail_deleter.py

The last thing is to enable the Gmail API and save the credentials.json inside the project's root directory.

Click on Create and then download the configuration.

Once you have downloaded it, save it inside the project's root directory. Such step is required for the authentication. Now you are ready for the purge.