Clear old machine mail out of Gmail in category sweeps

Mollica's Gmail held about 78,700 conversations, mostly automated mail built up since 2008. She ran Claude in Cowork mode with two ways into the account: the Gmail connector, which it used to search and judge what was junk, and Gmail open in the browser pane, where it used select-all to clear thousands of threads per action. Her prompt set keep rules first (anything a family member wrote, receipts under a set age, sign-in alerts filed instead of deleted, Trash never emptied). Claude counted everything before touching it, proposed an order, then took one pile at a time: auto-generated unsubscribe mail in Sent, old calendar notifications, the Social, Promotions and Forums tabs, older Updates, expired codes, statement notices and deploy alerts. She approved each pile after seeing a sample and a count. Security alerts went into a new label with a filter for future ones.

The account went from about 78,700 conversations to 62,067, with 16,657 moved to Trash. The biggest piles were Updates older than a year (about 4,700) and roughly 2,000 calendar notifications, four of which were kept because their events were still ahead. The Forums tab turned out to be mostly phishing. One sweep scoped to her daughter's old school domain took 15 personal threads, because the daughter used that account as her own email; all 15 were restored from Trash. Gmail's bulk delete also stalled partway through Promotions and had to be re-run.

Gmail deletes whole threads, so one matching message takes every reply in the conversation with it, including yours. She now has Claude search Trash for her own and family addresses after every sweep, not at the end. Trash empties itself after 30 days, which is the only undo. Claude will not sign in for you, so Gmail must already be open and logged in.