[OT] Deleting Thousends of Messages in Gmail

[Steve Litt]

On Sun, 23 Aug 2015 23:07:02 +0300
Amichai Rotman <amichai at iglu.org.il> wrote:

> I know it's kinda off-topic, but I am really at a loss...
> 
> I m trying to free spcace on my Google free storage, so i am sifting
> through very old messages to delete in my Gmail box (as far as 2005
> and beyond!)
> 
> I have this one label containing 12,000(!) messages. I'd like to
> delete all messages dated  before the current year.

One easy way, if you can let things run overnight, is to install
Claws-Mail, which is pretty darn fast. Point it at your Gmail IMAP,
filter out everything before 1/1/2015 (the advanced search thing for
selecting just the older messages is "ag" followed by a number of days
(the number of days since 12/31/2014. Then highlight them all and run
delete. Be sure you set Claws to delete immediately and not leave a
ghost copy (I don't know how to explain it any better).

Don't try this with Thunderbird. 12K messages with Thunderbird could
take several days just to load up.

SteveT