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Does anyone have a comprehensive/good solution to how to move all your stuff out of Gmail? Midway while typing this post, I did a search and boom: http://news.

Does anyone have a comprehensive/good solution to how to move all your stuff out of Gmail? Midway while typing this post, I did a search and boom: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3581613 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3581613

Teckla 14y ago
Does anyone have a comprehensive/good solution to how to move all your stuff out of Gmail? I use Thunderbird + IMAP to sync a local copy of my Gmail email every week or two. It does not sync anything except your email, but even that much is pretty nice, for peace of mind.
- manaskarekar 14y ago
  I don't use email clients, so pardon me if this is elementary, but is there a good way to compress and archive downloaded emails with their attachments? Also, is the formatting (rtf) preserved?
  - Teckla 14y ago
    I don't know the answer to your first question, but in response to your second question, yes, formatting is preserved.
  - chimeracoder 14y ago
    To answer your first question: It's certainly possible from a technical level, but I'm not aware of any end-user application that enables this functionality out-of-the-box. One hacky-but-straightforward way to do this would be to take advantage of an email<->filesystem translation like NMH or MBox, and then write some script that would automatically purge the attachments before archiving. You'd still have to download the attachments, I believe; I could be wrong, but I don't think IMAP will let you get around that easily. (To be fair, Gmail's implementation doesn't adhere to IMAP very well in my experience - labels/folders/tags are a major problem - so YMMV).
  - qu4z-2 14y ago
    If you're a technical sort, offlineimap is quite a good tool, although I don't think it compresses downloaded emails.
vl 14y ago
If you prefer command line, there is a script called imapsync. It looks like now it's sold for money, but there are older versions around back from the time when it was opensourced. I used it to move mail to gmail quite a while ago since I was tired of having mail, calendar and contacts in different places.

Teckla 14y ago

Does anyone have a comprehensive/good solution to how to move all your stuff out of Gmail? I use Thunderbird + IMAP to sync a local copy of my Gmail email every week or two. It does not sync anything except your email, but even that much is pretty nice, for peace of mind.

manaskarekar 14y ago
I don't use email clients, so pardon me if this is elementary, but is there a good way to compress and archive downloaded emails with their attachments? Also, is the formatting (rtf) preserved?
- Teckla 14y ago
  I don't know the answer to your first question, but in response to your second question, yes, formatting is preserved.
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  To answer your first question: It's certainly possible from a technical level, but I'm not aware of any end-user application that enables this functionality out-of-the-box. One hacky-but-straightforward way to do this would be to take advantage of an email<->filesystem translation like NMH or MBox, and then write some script that would automatically purge the attachments before archiving. You'd still have to download the attachments, I believe; I could be wrong, but I don't think IMAP will let you get around that easily. (To be fair, Gmail's implementation doesn't adhere to IMAP very well in my experience - labels/folders/tags are a major problem - so YMMV).
- qu4z-2 14y ago
  If you're a technical sort, offlineimap is quite a good tool, although I don't think it compresses downloaded emails.

vl 14y ago

If you prefer command line, there is a script called imapsync. It looks like now it's sold for money, but there are older versions around back from the time when it was opensourced. I used it to move mail to gmail quite a while ago since I was tired of having mail, calendar and contacts in different places.