DISCLAIMER: I am not afflicted with ProtonMail, just a fan and user of their product.
Part 1: The big cleanup
Before using precious storage space and saving future time for searching through emails, I decided to do some email deleting first.Big emails with attachments
First I started deleting big emails.
Mailing lists
Then I targeted mails from mailing lists (such as old newsletters) and generally mails sent as part of updates/notifications (XX sent you a message on YYY, XX replied to a thread you follow on YYY etc) which you open "one-time" and never look at again.
This I did by first adding my Gmail account to a email client, in this case Outlook but it is probably also possible with other free clients. I chose Outlook because it has powerful tools to sort, filter and view emails for quick deleting and cleanup.
- Make sure IMAP is enabled in your Gmail settings.
- Connect Gmail to Outlook
- You now have more powerful tools to sort, but the one I wanted was missing: Group emails by sender's email address. This way you can see all emails sent from etc PayPal in one "group" instead of multiple groups consisting of various names. You need to add a custom form configuration file. Here's another guide.
- Once the form is added, you can group the emails. Here's a guide. See the second part of the page "Group items manually or create a custom group" and follow it until this step:
"In the Group items by box, click a field to group by.
If the field that you want is not in the Group items by box, click a different field set in the Select available fields from box."- Here you need to add your new custom field. More help on how to do this here in the superuser guide
- This is how it looks:
- Now you have a view of all your emails grouped by sender, and you can select entire groups (for instance a newsletter email group), delete it, and scroll on. After a few hours i had reduced my emails with 50%, and deleted over 6000 emails.
Ever wondered what happens when you click the archive button, and where your archived emails go? Probably not, because Gmail hides these very well. There's no button to show them all. But you can use this smart search to show them.
I just deleted all emails that was in the archive. I also suspect that emails deleted through IMAP end in the archive, but did not investigate further.
Now that I have a nicely clean inbox, I could move on.-label:inbox -label:sent -label:drafts -label:notes
Part 2: The big labeling party
I wanted to keep the structure I had in Gmail with the tabs "Primary, Social networks, Updates, Promotions and Forums". Unfortunately the emails in the before-mentioned categories are not labeled with the category name (accessible in Google Takeout, but it is very easy to do that. Simply open a tab, select all mails, and apply a new label to them.I did this for the 5 categories/tabs and had 5 labels to work with.
Part 3: The big download
In Google Takeout, you can now select only Gmail, and choose your desired labels. I choose only the 5 I made for "Primary, Social networks, Updates, Promotions and Forums" and "Sent". You can download the data in various ways. And you will get one MBOX file per label.Part 4: The big import
Using this tool, you can select a folder containing a MBOX file to import to ProtonMail.https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/export-import-emails/
Important: You should only have one MBOX file in the folder you choose, and no other files or folders in it! Otherwise you will import all your Gmails into one single folder on ProtonMail.
And that's it! Enjoy your new privacy.
