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Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus the critical thing here: Backupify has restore. Who wants backup without restore?

You don't need to restore with Gmail.

One "restore" preference people have is account migration. Take all your email from one gmail account and import it into another.

Plus your response makes my mind boggle. People consider their gmail way too solid. There's lots of posts online of people who have lost their accounts completely.

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

#152
post #103
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation?

IIRC, the semantics used to be that if 1. You used the keep option, 2. fetchlimit was set to be less than the number of messages in the remote mailbox, and 3. The remote mailbox stayed above this limit, then you would find yourself in a state where fetchmail would say that it had fetched everything while there were unread messages that it would never look at. Looking for a bug report just now, I didn't see anything t…

Maybe this?:

http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/html/fetchmail-friends/2003-1...

While I can understand holding a grudge against any software that drops email -- that was in 2003...

[edit: also see markrages link on "why getmail" below]

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

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is mbox a broken format? It's a bad idea to use it in a multi-writer environment, and it's horrible because there are competing versions of it. But for plain storage, I thought it worked quite well. What am I missing?

[deleted]

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

#154
post #5

Thank you, Google. Glad to hear that the Data Liberation Front is alive and well: http://www.dataliberation.org/ From 2006: "We would never trap user data," he [Schmidt] said. [1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-we-wou...

I am glad they did this, as a user who already left the big G earlier this year. Its wasn't a big priority though because of IMAP and ICS. I already got my data out. If anything, I hope this helps promote the MBOX format for quickly moving mail around vs. error prone IMAP transitions.

It's pretty cool do download an archive though, instead of going through IMAP, for archival purposes that is. I have a lot of email in my GMail, going back to 2005 I think. I'm afraid of accidentally deleting it, plus I also use other email clients, like Thunderbird and I'm always triple-checking settings to ensure it doesn't delete old emails. Having the option of doing a dump from time to time, for storage, is really cool.

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

#155

IIRC, the last time Google gave a service the ability to download (export) data, they closed it shortly there after. (RIP Reader)

https://www.google.com/settings/takeout

Exporting data via Google Takeout is supported for 15 (and counting) products, including Youtube, Google+, Drive, and more. Google made a commitment to make it easy to extract your data, and is executing on that. It has nothing to do with shutting services down.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate - you willingly gave it to them, with almost zero contractual expectations. In a technical sense it is their stuff, and they have graciously implemented a feature allowing you to retrieve a copy of it. I definitely agree that it's the "right" thing to do, but this kind of comment speaks of entitlement and lack of personal responsibility. They're offering a service, they don't have any inheren…

Absolutely not. The implicit agreement is that they provide a service to hold, manage, and use your stuff, and you give up a certain amount of privacy by allowing them to see it - and they get to advertise at you while you use the service, and maybe make money in other ways off your information. So in other words, it really is your stuff. Imagine if they locked your accounts from you out of malice - it's legal gray a…

Implementing exporting features takes time and money. If such things would come for free, then they would have an obligation.

Yes, it's your stuff and I don't agree with the parent. But you're not necessarily entitled to features for an easy export of that stuff. That's the kind of agreement that has to be explicit in order for you to feel entitled.

Anyway, if you want fair treatment and to feel like a customer and not a product, you should pay for using it. I'm on Google Apps, I have my own domain and email address, I can always move, I don't get adds, I can use the Exchange protocol, I have more options for importing/exporting and the email support has been very responsive for me. From what I hear Office 365 is a solid option lately and there's also FastMail.fm and others.

And btw, allowing them to advertise in your Inbox does not make you the customer, you're just a user of free stuff. And free stuff is great, but not when you depend on it (unless it's open-source :))

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly keep deleted Google+ for over two years.

How do you know? Was it in click-through agreement when signing up?

People who deleted their account over two years ago, Google reactivate it by attaching it to their YouTube profile and everything's there.

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

#158
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is fairly obvious but there's a clear difference between "data belonging to a user" and "data about a user". The first is what they are talking about, because this is how vendor lock-in occurs.

Yes, there is a difference, absolutely. No, the line between the two categories is not clear at all.

Can you give me an example of an ambiguous case? I can't think of any personally.

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

#160
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We would never trap user data" No, we just use a different definition of "user data" than most privacy and civil rights laws. Or can I soon expect to be able to download all the data anything from Google+ buttons, YouTube to Doubleclick ads have gathered on me?

https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard

That first link is hilarious. I looked at my 'interests' based on my searches and apparently I really enjoy Athletics and Chevrolet. Weird considering I don't like either haha
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