Fun with Gmail - selecting emails with (unknown sender)

[csdude55]

I finally have all of my emails uploaded to Gmail (with some huge pains, but whatever). Yesterday I discovered that there were about 700,000 emails with no labels at all, though!

I have most of them properly sorted now, except for about 20,000.

One issue I'm seeing is that a lot of these 20,000 are old emails that say "unknown sender)" in the From. The actual header looks like:

Message ID <4646812341275317487@unknownmsgid>
Created at: Fri, May 2, 2003 at 2:22 AM (Delivered after 3600 seconds)
From:

Google says that you can search by Message-ID:

[support.google.com...]

But a search for "rfc822msgid:unknown" has 0 results. If I use the entire string then it does find that specific email, though, so I guess it's an exact match search instead of "contains".

Of course, I tried just searching for "unknownmsgid", but that returns 0, too.

Any other ideas?

[coothead]

<offtopic>
That is an unbelievable number of emails to receive, let alone save. :)
Do they have some sentimental value for you, like love letters perhaps?

Maybe I am the odd one here, I read my emails, reply to them if necessary
and then delete all traces of them.
</oftopic>

coothead

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

That's nearly 40 emails a day for 50 years in number... too many.

Are you sending out automated emails or something? Gmail limits the number of emails you can send or get per day, and the number of people you can add as recipients, so expect more issues.

If you're not a spammer and honestly need such a high volume to be searchable load them to a database instead. Gmail is NOT designed for such volume.

[csdude55]

Haha, no, nothing like that. These emails go back for roughly 20 years, and most are automated emails from forms on my site (message boards, classifieds, etc). While MOST of these emails could be tossed, every once in awhile I'll get an email from an old client or user and it helps to review our old exchanges.

Recent example: someone that I had blocked a few years ago emailed and wanted me to let him use my sites again. I'm a generous guy and almost did, but then I found his old emails where he told my girlfriend that he hoped someone raped her! Nah, man, I'm fine without you on my site, thanks! LOL

Recognizing that storage is relatively cheap, I run with the theory that it's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

Out of those 700,000, I was able to search and label most of those from automated forms pretty easily. But it also looks like a lot were emails that I had shift+deleted in Outlook to permanently delete while IMAPed to Gmail. But instead of deleting them, Gmail archived them (eg, no label). They're a bit harder to track down.

And lot of them, including the "unknown sender" emails, are ones that I had sent via Outlook and Gmail can't sync them to the Sent folder.

The rest? I have no clue why there's no label. So I'm having to manually go through the remainder and re-label what I can.

I have it down to 14,703, and counting :-O

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

What I'd do....

Since it's now all in gmail, download a copy of your gmail email history and parse it into a database with as many fields as is reasonable. Next set up a system to process new emails into said database. You can then slice and dice the data and retrieve it any way you see fit, whenever and however you want.

You just can't count on Gmail allowing you infinite emails, unlimited search quality etc forever. Owning the actual data puts you back in control of it, right now it's Google's with a gmail interface. Not ideal for this.

If you own the database you could parse the sender data into the appropriate field with one command for all 14, 703 you have left.

Bonus - you'll learn about databases and could do something like download affiliate data feeds into a single database and create your own price comparison tool or have multiple offers for any product or whatever.

[tangor]

While my historical emails do not approach near 3/4 million, I do have several hundred thousand dating back to 1983... (helped by converting as needed as technology changed).

On the other hand, packratitis is a debilitating disease. At some point you have to dump the chaff!

MEANWHILE, putting all your email eggs in g's basket could result in the nursery rhyme/adage of old. Sgt Kickaxe offers good advice regarding the "permanence" of g's email hosting for your biz ... Personally, I DELETE all my emails from third parties I use, when it makes sense to do so, and archive any emails I wish to keep on local machines/removable disks, etc.

One COULD database the mess ... but I've found that ordinary content searches gives sterling results.

At present you're managing what you have, with a provider currently servicing that need, but Sarge and I ... we strongly suggest you BACK IT UP and DO IT YOURSELF!

NOTE: just because it is email, you don't NEED an email program to search or read it. Other tools out there!