Some tools to manage large numbers of Gmail filters.

These tools use the Gmail API. To run these scripts you will need to enable the API on your account following the instructions here for creating an API Key and Credentials.

The process of creating an API account with the Google developer console will require creating and copying locally the credentials as credentials.json in the same path as the tools. I went with creating an "OAuth 2.0 Client IDs" entry and clicking the Download JSON link.

The API documentation for filters is here. I also found this document helpful when working through the process of getting the authentication working.

The first time in a while that any of the tools are run you may be directed to log in and accept the features of the tool. I have found problems with this workflow if the browser used for accepting the features is not the Chrome browser.

This is for pulling down the full list of filters on a Gmail account and storing them into a local file. Further processing of the list of filters divides the list into "active" and "old" filters: a search is run based on the rules of the filter and if e-mails are found that were received less than a year ago the filter is considered "active".

I had a lot of filters that assign a label and alos remove the Inbox label from the e-mail (archiving it). I later decided that workflow wasn't very effective for me and wanted to keep the e-mails in the Inbox until I had a chance to acknowledge them. There isn't a way in Gmail to apply a change in rules across a batch of filters, so this tool was useful to remove the archiving action on a large number of filters.

Filters are taken from the "active" list prepared by FindOldFilters and operated on ~10 at a time by default, tracking which ones are relevant (have the removeLabelIds action) and which have already been processed. The operation is destructive: the old filter is delete-d and a new one without the Inbox removal action is create-d, and the create process can be rather slow so batching in groups of ~10 helped in troubleshooting if something looked wrong. (Final execution had no issues.)

This tool calls for a delete of the "old" filters discovered by FindOldFilters.