Is there a way to mass-delete everything that I've "archived" (and, ideally, received before X date) while preserving everything that's still in "inbox," regardless of whether it's read/unread?

@hannah

you may be able to apply a label to everything you have archived and from before a cutoff date, and then open your account through an IMAP client that will parse the label as a folder in its ui w/everything grouped together, and then mass-delete by nuking them through that application.

doing this in the gmail web interface is gonna going through the messages one page of results at a time, clicking select all, clicking delete, and then next page.

@jackdaw_ruiz @hannah Seconding this; I would absolutely do this in Thunderbird via IMAP instead of the web interface as it'll almost certainly be easier to get to the selection of messages you want and you don't have to deal with pagination.