GoldMine’s Links tab is a great place to store files related to your contacts.  I’ve seen plenty of customers use the links tab to solve real business problems with this easy-to-use GoldMine feature:

• police departments store mugshots
• real estate agents store property photos
• headhunters store resumes
• architects store blueprints

Less helpful is the fact that, by default, GoldMine also stores every e-mail attachment you and your contacts exchange.  On the surface, this might seem like a good idea — a time-saving automation.  In practice, however, this can quickly lead to the accumulation of debris items on your contacts’ links tab: All of those little images that say ‘like us on facebook!’ or ‘connect on linkedin’ or your client’s company logo that shows up at the bottom of each and every e-mail they ever compose will end up on the links tab.  They can pile up quickly.  Before you know it, you could have contacts with thousands of lines of debris items drowning out the important ‘signed contract’ or ‘house blueprints’ links you actually need to find quickly.

What can you do?  Manually delete these items from time to time?  Let all your business contact know that you would prefer they not include images in their signatures?  Grumpily refuse to engage in HTML e-mail?

How about a real solution?

I wrote a little utility that I’ve called Deletor (intended to be spoken aloud in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice.)

Deletor provides a one-screen interface to delete all links (and the actual files) below a particular file size.  Since those little blue F icons are usually very small images, the sizes of the associated image files is typically quite small (1-10 kilobytes isn’t uncommon.)

It also provides an option to remove links where the file the link points to is no-longer there.  This can, of course, be a somewhat dangerous step as the file(s) on the links tab could point anywhere.  Maybe your co-worker on another workstation linked a file on the T: drive, but you don’t even have a mapping for the T: drive on your workstation.  If you check the box to remove links pointing to missing files, you’ll delete that link record.

I’ve provided a test-run functionality in Deletor.  You can simply check the Test Run checkbox and Deletor won’t actually delete anything.  It will scroll through all the items it would have deleted (including missing items) so you can get an idea of the scope of what might happen if you actually run the tool.

Warning: There are plenty of scenarios where running Deletor might be a scary proposition.  It’s a sledgehammer approach to the scourge that is links tab debris.  In the wrong hands/with the wrong options selected, it could delete any/all of your links tab entries and any/all of the items in your entire mailbox attachments, tmplinks, corporate file share, etc. folders.  You could, conceivably, take down and/or irretrievably destroy your entire GoldMine installation and even the windows server it’s on with this utility.  This utility could impact anything/everything any GoldMine user might have attached to an e-mail ever.  Maybe you e-mailed a tiny .DLL file to someone from your windows\system32 folder ten years ago.  Guess what, if it’s less than X kilobytes in size, it could get deleted by this utility.

If you’re at all nervous about running Deletor, don’t.  Castell Computers won’t be held responsible for any data loss, business interruption, loss-of-employment or any other outcome from using Deletor.

Before running Deletor, you should verify that your backup(s) are in good order.  You should make another one just to be safe.  Backup your database, your GoldMine files, your ‘other’ files, your family photos, your music — everything.

Scared yet?  Good.

Now, if you think you’re ready, go ahead and download and enjoy Deletor.