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:

  1. Use Thunderbird and download using the IMAP option, so download every thing in every folder, e.g. Sent, Starred, Inbox, Important.

  2. 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

  • yuman@programming.dev
    4·
    5 days ago

    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.