Crib Notes: Has My EC2's AMI-Publisher Updated Their AMIs

Discovered, late yesterday afternoon, that the automation I'd used to deploy my development-EC2, had had some updates and that these updates (rotating some baked-in query-credentials) were breaking my  development-EC2's ability to use some resources (since they could no longer access those resources). So, today, I'll need to re-deploy my EC2. I figured that, since it'd been since September 14th since I'd launched my EC2, perhaps a new AMI was available (our team publishes new AMIs each month). So, what's a quick way to tell if a new AMI is available? Some nested AWS CLI commands:

aws \
  --output text ec2 describe-images \
  --owner $(
  aws ec2 describe-images \
    --output text \
    --image-ids $(
    aws ec2 describe-instances \
      --output text \
      --query 'Reservations[].Instances[].ImageId' \
      --instance-ids <CURRENT_EC2_ID>  ) \
  --query 'Images[].OwnerId'
) \
  --query 'Images[].{ImageId:ImageId,CreationDate:CreationDate,Name:Name}' | \
sort -nk 1

Sadly, the answer, today, is, "no". I apparently, this month's release-date is going to be later today or tomorrow. So, I'll just be re-deploying from September's AMI.

ACTUALLY Deleting Emails in gSuite/gMail

Each month, I archive all the contents of my main gSuite account to a third-party repository. I do this via an IMAP-based transfer.

Unfortunately, when you use an IMAP-based transfer to move files, Google doesn't actually delete the emails from your gMail/gSuite account. No, it simply removes all labels from them. This means that instead of getting space back – space that Google charges for in gSuite – the messages simply become not-easily-visible within gMail. None of your space is freed up and, thus, space-charges for those unlabeled emails continue to accrue.

Discovered this annoyance a couple years ago when my mail-client was telling me I was getting near the end of my quota. When I first got the quota-warning, I was like, "how??? I've offloaded all my old emails. There's only a month's worth of email in my Inbox, Sent folder and my per-project folders!" That prompted me to dig around to discover the de-labled/not-deleted fuckery. So, I dug around further to find a method for viewing those de-labeled/not-deleted files. Turns out, putting:

-has:userlabels -in:sent -in:chat -in:draft -in:inbox

In your webmail search-bar will show you them …and allow you to delete them.

My gSuite account was a couple years old when I discovered all this. So, when I selected all the unlabeled emails for deletion, it took a while for Google to actually delete them. However, once the deletion completed, I recovered nearly 2GiB worth of space in my gSuite account.