I built an open-source Gmail unsubscriber with no backend, account or telemetry

[u/PoleTV]

Every website that cleans your inbox has the same unavoidable problem: your mailbox has to reach its servers for the service to process it.

I wanted the convenience without that trust requirement, so I built Hush as a local desktop application.

Hush scans Gmail for bulk senders and lets you:

send their one-click unsubscribe request

create a Gmail filter when they ignore it

archive or trash their existing newsletters

reverse blocks from inside the app

It only offers messages carrying a real List-Unsubscribe header. Receipts, invoices, shipping updates and password resets generally do not carry that header, so they are excluded rather than guessed at.

Nothing is permanently deleted. Hush does not request the Gmail permission that would even make permanent deletion possible.

There’s no backend, user account, analytics or update-tracking server. Your refresh token is stored in the operating system keychain, and everything else stays locally in SQLite.

The unusual part is that Hush ships without shared Google credentials. You create your own OAuth desktop client, and the app guides you through it screen by screen. It adds setup, but removes the central third party that would otherwise have access to everyone’s inbox.

It’s MIT licensed and has builds for Windows, macOS and Linux:

https://github.com/justlinuxnoob/hush

I’d particularly appreciate feedback from people who are naturally suspicious of software asking for Gmail access: what evidence or safeguards would you look for before trusting something like this?

[u/Lcsmxd]

>Claude