Live data from Hacker News

Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

gmailblog.blogspot.com

61–70 of 173 posts

Re: Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

#63
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, after all, you already could access your email via imap and do the backup by yourself.

My mom couldn't. Nor about 95% of the rest of my friends and family. But clicking export and then download? All of them can do that.

Really? Every email application I've used in the past few years asks for your name / email address / password on the first wizard-page. They automatically detect gmail, hook everything up, and start downloading without any further steps.

Re: Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

#64
post #19

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…

Why would Google keep a copy of your mail if your account was deactivated for 6 years? Isn't that asking a bit much considering you were the one that broke the ToS?

They certainly keep deleted Google+ for over two years.

Re: Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

#67
post #2

Which would be the alternatives that allow to import an MBOX archive? I am not familiar with email storage.

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…

I've done similar things a variety of times, the download -> copy -> paste routine is pretty simple. So far I've never had a problem with it (even moving 100k or so).

Re: Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

#68

For anyone looking to an alternative method, there is a great open source Python script called Bagoma that incrementally backs up your Gmail account: http://bagoma.sourceforge.net/ . Each email is stored as an individual text file rather than the mbox format. I have backed up my account with it every few days for a couple of years and it works great. It will even restore your account to Gmail if you need to switch ac…

FWIW I needed to do this to back up business emails when I closed down my last shop. At the time, all the open source projects I found didn't manage to correctly download ALL messages. I was finally able to do it by doing an HTML inject, and using JS to load each email iteratively.

Re: Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

#69
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mom couldn't. Nor about 95% of the rest of my friends and family. But clicking export and then download? All of them can do that.

Really? Every email application I've used in the past few years asks for your name / email address / password on the first wizard-page. They automatically detect gmail, hook everything up, and start downloading without any further steps.

Yes, to the point that it is very easy to crash Thunderbird if you blindly hook it into your GMail account.

Re: Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

#70
post #35

Mbox, eh? Can anyone confirm that they've implemented this properly, particularly when it comes to escaping lines in message bodies that start with "From "? Failure to properly escape such lines was an infamous bug with Mail.app's mbox exporter[1]. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20070329131522/http://diveintomar...

mbox can't be implemented properly, it is an inherently broken format. Or rather, a family of almost compatible broken formats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox Sounds like Mail.app exported in mboxcl2, which breaks mail readers expecting the mboxo or the mboxrd formats. I recommend people to use IMAP for extracting the mail, and to store it in something outside the mbox family.

I've got mbsync set up to periodically dump my Gmail into a local Maildir archive. Works great, and it was a (relative) breeze to integrate with my old mail archives reaching back to the late 90's.
Post reply on HN