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Show HN: Unattach – free up your Google storage by removing Gmail attachments
31 points by strnisa on May 23, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments
Hello HackerNews!

I have a full-time job, but love building productivity tools in my spare time. Some time ago, my dad told me that his Gmail account was full and asked whether I could help. I built a simple app for him, and later decided to make it into a product. With the recent news that Google is discontinuing free storage for photos, more and more people are facing a similar problem.

Unattach (https://unattach.app) is a desktop app for downloading and/or removing Gmail attachments from many emails at once. You can use it to free up your Google storage, which is shared between Gmail, Photos and other Google apps. For most people, using Unattach is cheaper than buying more Google storage; for tech-savvy users, it’s free.

The hardest thing about Unattach has been balancing user trust and commercial potential. The app requires edit permissions to the user’s Gmail account in order to remove attachments. Therefore, it is important to establish trust between myself and the user. Many users felt significantly more at ease if they could build the app from source (or at least knowing that they could), in addition to the app being certified by Google. On the other hand, the more revenue I receive from the app, the more incentive I have to continue supporting it.

The model I ended up with involves sharing the source code (under a restricted Shared Source license: https://github.com/rokstrnisa/unattach), so tech-savvy users can build and run it for free, and offering pre-built installers for a fee. That is, the software is free and the source is shared (though it's not “open source”), and users pay for the convenience of installers. The model has been working reasonably well.

Users of Unattach are generally very happy with it, so I wanted more people to know about it. I launched the app on ProductHunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/unattach) earlier today, and am now sharing it with HackerNews.

Happy to answer any questions you may have!




I really cleaned out Gmail a couple of months ago and all I had to do was to filter for attachments over a specific size. How much different is your app?


The main benefit of using Unattach over simply deleting the emails is that you can keep all the other parts of your emails in your Gmail server. These are often valuable, don't take much space and can continue to be searched. Unattach also provides various facilities to make finding and storing attachments in custom directory structures easy.


Worked well for me, thank you!

Top bar menus won't stay open and can't be used unless I hold mouse down and navigate with arrows. Linux and compiled from source.


Refreshing to see a Java app trending on HN.


Great! Can you make one for Google photos? It's impossible to delete photos easily from Google


is this possible to make this as webiste


I believe that it would be possible to make it into a website, yes.

The main reason why I haven't gone this way is because of the trust issue, which most users care about. At the moment, user data flows only between the Google servers and the user's local computer, which is easy to check. With the website, it's harder for the user to know that the Unattach server doesn't store private data.

In addition, it's more complicated for a web application to store data to the local filesystem.




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