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I know this is an odd question but... Have you tried deleting a very large number of messages? I am talking about > 100,000. I once needed to clean up > millio

I know this is an odd question but... Have you tried deleting a very large number of messages? I am talking about > 100,000. I once needed to clean up > million messages and it was rather challenging even utilizing Google's scripting. Batching ( within Google's recommended parameters ) would periodically fail. Triggers would not run. etc.

bishalb 7y ago
You can just Create a filter to delete such messages and check apply to all existing conversations.
- stevekemp 7y ago
  Having gone through this recently you'll see a spinner/progress indicator. Then a short time later it'll terminate and half your messages will still be present. I took several days deleting a few hundred thousand messages, "Select all", "delete". Each time it would remove 1000-10,000 messages and leave the rest. Was a real pain.
  - notyourday 6y ago
    After a lot of trial and error I have been successful at doing a limit fetch and limit delete with a limit of 9000 in 5 minute intervals using scripting API with a registering a timed trigger. 1. Get current time, increase the time by 5 minutes and find the 5 minute mark after that. 2. Register itself to run the time determined in (1). 3. Fetch a batch of 9000 ids matching the filter. 4. Delete the batch This script would comfortably run for days cleaning out the inbox until it would hit some weird message that looked nearly identical to the messages around it and bomb(!?). Running it by hand would bomb at which point script won't be able to continue to execute. Deleting a message by hand would work. Running the script again after the manual deletion would work.
- notyourday 6y ago
  My first thought after "how hard can it be? Since all the messages are from the monitoring systems I can just assign the labels based on the 'from' address and..." was to use that exact approach. It have never seen that many timeouts in my life.
pfranz 7y ago
I've had the same issue spanning years. I didn't bother going further than the web UI. I would delete 100k+ messages, it would hang, and when it returned it would only have deleted like 70k.
abionic 7y ago
yes I did although I tried deleting for one or two years at a time
emmelaich 7y ago
This hack might work. 1. Move all the messages to a folder. 2. Then delete that folder.

bishalb 7y ago

You can just Create a filter to delete such messages and check apply to all existing conversations.

stevekemp 7y ago
Having gone through this recently you'll see a spinner/progress indicator. Then a short time later it'll terminate and half your messages will still be present. I took several days deleting a few hundred thousand messages, "Select all", "delete". Each time it would remove 1000-10,000 messages and leave the rest. Was a real pain.
- notyourday 6y ago
  After a lot of trial and error I have been successful at doing a limit fetch and limit delete with a limit of 9000 in 5 minute intervals using scripting API with a registering a timed trigger. 1. Get current time, increase the time by 5 minutes and find the 5 minute mark after that. 2. Register itself to run the time determined in (1). 3. Fetch a batch of 9000 ids matching the filter. 4. Delete the batch This script would comfortably run for days cleaning out the inbox until it would hit some weird message that looked nearly identical to the messages around it and bomb(!?). Running it by hand would bomb at which point script won't be able to continue to execute. Deleting a message by hand would work. Running the script again after the manual deletion would work.
notyourday 6y ago
My first thought after "how hard can it be? Since all the messages are from the monitoring systems I can just assign the labels based on the 'from' address and..." was to use that exact approach. It have never seen that many timeouts in my life.

pfranz 7y ago

I've had the same issue spanning years. I didn't bother going further than the web UI. I would delete 100k+ messages, it would hang, and when it returned it would only have deleted like 70k.

abionic 7y ago

yes I did although I tried deleting for one or two years at a time

emmelaich 7y ago

This hack might work. 1. Move all the messages to a folder. 2. Then delete that folder.