Email Tamer

A personal command-line tool for finding and clearing promotional email out of your own Gmail inbox.

What Email Tamer is for

Email Tamer solves one problem: a personal Gmail inbox slowly filling with marketing mail that its owner never chose and never reads. It scans the mailbox it has been given access to, groups mail by sending domain, and scores each sender by how likely its mail is promotional rather than something the owner actually needs — a receipt, a school notice, a bank statement. It then helps the owner act on the result: unsubscribe, file the sender under a label, archive the backlog, or leave it alone.

It runs from the command line on the operator's own computer, against the operator's own mailbox. It is a personal project used by its author and his household. There is no service, no hosting, no sign-up, and no other users.

What it does

Scores senders from message metadata, with specific guards against misreading order confirmations, shipping notices and receipts as marketing.
Keeps a human-edited allowlist, so a sender the owner has already confirmed legitimate is never flagged again.
Files wanted-but-not-urgent bulk mail — newsletters, neighborhood digests — under a label instead of the inbox.
Emails the mailbox's owner a periodic summary of what changed.

Why it needs access to Gmail

Permission	What it is used for
`gmail.modify`	Read message headers to identify senders, and apply the resulting changes: add or remove labels, archive, or move a message to Trash. Message bodies are never read.
`gmail.send`	Send the periodic summary email to the mailbox's own owner. Nothing is sent to anyone else.
`gmail.settings.basic`	Create Gmail filters that route future mail from a known promotional sender, and read the account's send-as aliases so the owner's own outgoing mail is not scored as spam.

Privacy

All data stays on the operator's computer. The privacy policy sets out exactly what is accessed, where it is stored, how long it is kept, and the single case in which any data leaves the machine.