Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

mbox is a standard email storage format. It's not ideal for a live email system, but not bad for archiving or for import/export purposes.

You can import mbox into variety of desktop email clients and, using IMAP, upload them to web-based UIs.

Here's how to move off Gmail to Rackspace (not free) email, I've done it last weekend [1]:

  - Enable IMAP access in Gmail
  - Add Gmail account to Apple's Mail.app
  - Wait for Mail app to sync.
  - You have a full copy of GMail archive on your computer now
  - Select all messages in Mail app, and select Message/Copy To
  - Pick Rackspace inbox and click "OK"
  - Delete all your email messages in Gmail, purge Trash. 
  - Done.

I also exported Gmail labels into separate mbox files just in case.

[1] http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/webmail

P.S. For anyone wondering, I moved off Gmail because of two reasons:

  1. New compose window was impossible for me to use.
  2. Security issues.

We are rolling this feature out slowly, right now only about 1% of people have access to Takeout's of GMail. But we hope to increase it to 100%, including Google Apps accounts (if your administrator hasn't blocked it) over the next couple weeks.

¡From hell's heart I stab at thee, lines beginning with the word "From".

Scroll down to see a detailed how-to. I've used Apple's mail app to transfer messages.

Unfortunately this requires you to be able to log in. I had an account (with the same name I use here) mysteriously stop being able to log in about 6 years ago. I lost all of my email, contacts, and calendars.

I was never able to find out why the account was shut down, I'm guessing it was a ToS violation for something I did several months before I got banned (made 100+ gmail accounts with my invites, didn't use them for nefarious purposes though.) Just one day I couldn't log in and got an ambiguous page about account deactivation. No amount of emails or form filling ever earned a response from Google. That was it. Blam. Gone. Ever since then, I have not trusted Google with any data that I care about.

It would be nice if this tool worked for deactivated accounts.