I have like 20+ years of Gmail messages. I want to download all of these messages to my hard drive. The plan is to get my data downloaded first before moving to another email provider.
Sure, I can just forward my Gmail to Proton/Tuta but i prefer to keep those services clean.
I will still keep my Gmail in case some old contacts / subscriptions need to email. But the important part is my 20+ years of data, I dont trust Google to keep everything.
I have several options:
-
Use Thunderbird and download using the IMAP option, so download every thing in every folder, e.g. Sent, Starred, Inbox, Important.
-
iiirc, Google allows you to use the checkout feature to download a .mbox file. Is this feasible?
So far I am on 1) and Thunderbird is taking a VERY long time to download. From my Google storage page , i have like 10 GB of emails. But the downloaded emails from Thunderbird are around 20 GB… So either Google is lying about their stat or Thunderbird is acting up. Still, i can see most of my old emails. It is still downloading though…
Any input is appreciated
get a local instance of dovecot running with the barest functions, like IMAP ony. it’s docker-friendly, so you can run it thus and you can have your local repository of all your emails.
you connect to it from thunderbird as another account, in addition to your gmail account. what you do is just select all the gmail emails (in the folder All emails) and copy or move them to the new folder on your server.
then, you can shut down the container and spin it up only when you need stuff off it.
In general, setting up a client with POP3 rather than IMAP will move all the emails from the inbox to the client. Once they are in the client you can decide how to backup the archive, there’s plenty of options with varying performance and memory footprint. That sounds pretty much like what you would like to do in general.
Just for completeness: That of course also means that syncing to several devices and backups are now your problems to solve.
In any case, the initial download will take a long time either way if you have 20+ years and 10s of GBs of data. No way around that.
Your first path is fine. Thunderbird shoes you the full size of your mailbox though while Google only shows you how much space you used that counts against their allowance. Not everything counts into r that.
In addition Google had a while ago an “export all my data” tool but I don’t know if that’s still around:
takeout.google.com will give you options to download your data for any Google service (guessing this is where you saw the note about obtaining the mbox file). This is probably the easiest way, and Thunderbird should be able to open that mbox file directly after you obtain it.
This is by far the fastest, safest and most complete option.
One tip: Make sure that all the things you want to export are ticked because by default they’re not.
You can even set this up as a regular process if you want.
Source: long time user
