Using Gmail’s Python API To Delete 10,000 emails In Less Than Two Minutes (Pt. I)

Paying The Price Of Information Laziness

One of my dirty secrets is, despite being a data engineer, I’m a bit of an information hoarder.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t save terabytes of the Internet on USB drives. I’m also not proactively gathering evidence for a trial I hope never comes.

What it comes down to is that, like a lot of us, I’m overwhelmed with information. And I lack the time, motivation and effort to continually trawl my inbox for gems in a landfill of conversational junk.

Which is why I’ve recently been getting some blatant warnings that if I don’t start hauling some of these messages to the trash icon, I’m going to hit gmail’s 15 GB cap.

With less than 3% of my storage limit remaining, I’m still stubbornly avoiding a manual process.

Instead, I’ve conceived a script that will leverage gmail’s Python API to delete messages based on query parameters.

In the first of (at least) two parts, I’ll take you through my process from authentication to cleaned data to be used as an input for the DELETE end point in part two.

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