Skip to content

Show HN: MailScrub – terminal UI for bulk Gmail unsubscribing

github.com/brooksc
2 pointsbrookscdiscuss
On HN

Built this for myself — I had 13K unread emails and no patience to deal with them one at a time.

Gmail's new "Manage subscriptions" is handy but it only unsubscribes going forward. It doesn't touch the 500 old emails already in your inbox from that sender. MailScrub does both: unsubscribe and nuke the backlog in one shot.

It's a terminal UI that pulls down your Gmail headers into a local SQLite db, groups them by sender, and lets you blaze through them. For senders with a List-Unsubscribe header it handles the HTTP/mailto request automatically. For ones without it, it opens browser tabs.

Nothing leaves your machine — you auth against your own Google Cloud OAuth client.

https://github.com/brooksc/MailScrub

Biggest gotcha: you need to set up a personal Google Cloud project to get an OAuth client (~10 min, instructions in the README). I couldn't find a way around this for Gmail API access. Open to ideas. Only tested on Mac so far.

Comments

No comments yet.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.