Notes: Deleting just the attachments from Gmail

- saw that 60% of my inbox capacity is used up; I know that this keeps increasing incrementally, but since I started at this job, the increase in space can't keep up with the increase in e-mails with attachments

- couldn't find any in-Gmail solution to deleting just the attachments without losing the message itself
> suggestions on help forums included forwarding the message to myself while unchecking the attachment box; didn't like this as I wanted Gmail conversations/threads to stay intact and to keep the name of the original sender
> other popular suggestion was to use an e-mail client with IMAP, like Thunderbird

- while Thunderbird was downloading, followed forum poster's advice and searched Gmail w/ "has:attachment" (no quotes), then labelled everything with a new label, CheckAttachment

- in Thunderbird, saw
> over 500 messages in the CheckAttachment folder
> some of them with attachments I wanted to save, like work documents, stuff from parents and other family, stuff from old schoolmates
> couldn't get through all that without fear of deleting something I wanted to keep
> deleted some stuff I wanted to keep after all

- new process:
1. in Gmail, go through CheckAttachment label w/ combined search operators (e.g. "label:checkattachment" and "label:family-mail") to get good stuff out of CheckAttachment
2. sync Thunderbird again
3. proceed with deletion