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Why not give me a nice big mbox file with all my emails in it as well? That's honestly the main thing that Google has that I care about preserving.
by jncraton 15y ago
Why not give me a nice big mbox file with all my emails in it as well? That's honestly the main thing that Google has that I care about preserving.
- ch0wn 15y agoShouldn't that be possible via IMAP?
- netrus 15y agoIt should be easier than that.
- Groxx 15y agoPOP? It's leaner. Seriously, it's an absolutely perfect match for exporting everything, and it's easy to set up, and you get it in the format of your choice. Infinitely easier than having them support only formats they have time to write exporters for. It's also easily resumable, unlike the 8GB zip file I'd otherwise have to download.
- lukeschlather 15y agoPOP might be a start, though for a proper backup tags need to be included somehow, maybe in a custom header field.
- pyre 15y agoYou do realize that POP only supports your Inbox, right? The protocol has no concept of 'folders' or 'tags.'
- Groxx 15y agoI think if you switch it to "all mail", it downloads everything. Though you might be right.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- albertzeyer 15y agoAfaik, not really. Mails in GMail are not represented in a hierarchical tree structure and thus don't directly match the IMAP protocol.
- pyre 15y agoI'm confused. How does a single large mbox file of all emails in a GMail account map directly to GMail's structure? That's the the OP was asking for.
- ammmir 15y agoIMAP can be used to download the raw message bodies. hierarchical structure (aka threading) comes from the parsing of Message-ID, References, In-Reply-To MIME headers contained in the bodies.
- albertzeyer 15y agoI mean directories. GMails IMAP interface maps each tag to a directory but that is not exactly the same. Esp. when your extracting algorithm doesn't know about this, you end up with a lot of duplicates.
- thwarted 15y agoSo only download the All Mail folder into a single mbox.
- albertzeyer 15y agoThen you miss the tagging information.
- joejohnson 15y agoYes, it is possible
- sdfjkl 15y agoThis is possible via the Google Apps Email Audit API[1], which is accessibly only by paid Google Apps accounts. The API submitted export request takes usually several hours to complete and results in a series of large mbox files (1 GB chunks I think) containing the entire mailbox, including trash (if requested). However some meta information such as labels/folders is not present, but the results can easily be concatenated into a single mbox file containing the entire contents of a Google Apps email account. [1] http://code.google.com/googleapps/domain/audit/docs/1.0/audit_developers_guide_protocol.html http://code.google.com/googleapps/domain/audit/docs/1.0/audi...
- eli 15y agoThanks for that. Weird that it's a buried feature. Seems like "easy self-directed backups" would be a nice selling point.