Iphone Notes app is saving tens of thousands of copies of notes to Gmail

Finally! I have been searching for someone with the same problem. So annoying right?!

I am a serious Notes user.

Here is my system: I have 33 notes in my Gmail folder, each for a different topic (one for music stuff, one for art, one for writing, etc. // I'm very organized & nerdy about it. photo below). Each note is huge tho. They contain lots and lots of text, and some have photos. I'm always adding to them, they're like sketchbooks to me, and as a result some of the notes are really long -- when saved as .pdfs, some are over 100 pages.

My gmail storage is filling up, for the same reason as the original poster

In the past, I have tried mass-deleting all of the literally thousands of emails for just one of my notes. When I did that, I lost the note itself from Gmail. Very sad.

So my question is -- is it really safe to ONLY keep the latest update email in gmail, and delete all of the others?

My plan is to duplicate the note in question before deleting the update emails for it.

I know that this problem doesn't seem to exist for notes saved in the iCloud folder, tho my reason for using the Gmail folder is aesthetic -- I think the fonts & design elements look better in the Gmail notes (I'm using lots of color and text design so the look is important to me). Maybe I need to get over that and make the switch tho, as I haven't found a way of dealing with the constant flood of new emails every time I write a new letter to one of my precious notes.

thanks for addressing this!

Google's implementation of IMAP, which notes relies on for syncing with an email account, is horribly non-standard.

I'd say just sync your notes to iCloud instead. Or at the very least, find an email provider that uses a standards-based implementation of IMAP

Morningsong888 wrote:

I have my notes app attached to gmail. That's all well and good. However, I recently realized that the app isn't just saving the most recent version of a note to my gmail, it's also sending me an email for every edit I have ever done to a note. I have thousands and thousands of emails in my "all mail" box.

Is there a way to make it so that it ONLY saves the most recent version to my "notes" box in gmail and to get it to stop sending me emails with every edit? Or at the least, is there a way to block these emails or make them delete after a certain period of time? Or can someone recommend to me an app that could perform similarly without the bugginess?

I know there's also an option to back up to iCloud but I've never used it and I'm concerned about notes being lost in the process of switching over. How would that even work?

I can't imagine that anyone would want to be sent these emails and it's obviously a bug sigh. I've seen many people ask this question, saying they're having the same problem, and not get an answer. If the link between gmail and notes is buggy, it should be fixed.

Probably a good question to ask gmail support or look at their support site.

Same problem and it's taking up all of my Gmail space. I want to do what you've suggested above, but I've done some testing and found the note itself will also be deleted from the notes app if the last saved edit email is deleted. This is what makes mass deletions impossible for me as I have to painstakingly cross reference against the last saved version date to make sure not to delete that one single one.

I'm wondering didn't you run into this issue where your notes disappeared from the notes app? Thanks