So, if we accept the premise, for the moment, that it might be a good idea to stop using Google services, how do you get back the data you’ve already given them?
Surprisingly, perhaps, it’s really quite easy. Your main port-of-call will be https://www.google.com/takeout, which allows you to package your data up from its various services and download them as a simple zip file. The download of any photos uploaded to Google’s Picasa servers was swift and pain-free, for example.
But there’s a huge gap in Takeout’s offerings: the email! There’s no easy way to get all your gmail downloaded using Google’s own tools.
A cross-platform, comprehensive and zero-cost tool to achieve that is, however, available as a simple software download. Point it at your email account and a local folder in which it can store its work and pretty soon you’ll have a bazillion “.eml” files, each one representing a separate email. Handily, it doesn’t just restrict itself to your inbox: anything in your sent mail folder is backed up, too.
Reading the exported mail is perhaps not as easy as it should be. Thunderbird will do it without fancy filters or import tools: just drag and drop the multiple EML files into a suitable folder and the thing will chug along until all files are across. Once they’re in Thunderbird’s format, it’s trivial to get them into something like Evolution. The tricky bit is simply finding Thunderbird’s own data store: on Windows 7, it’s C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\<some random number>.default\Mail\Local Folders. Somewhere in there should be the folder representing all your gmail conversions -mine was a single 156MB file. You then just copy that in its entirety to a place where Evolution can make use of it. Run Evolution’s import wizard, point it at the Gmail file, and it should correctly interepret its results, importing them to a directory of your choosing.
And if you’re like me, you’ll suddenly realise that you replied to people in 2006 with somewhat less than subtlety and pleasantness. Belated apologies if you were one of those recipients.
There are other ways to extract your Google email -native Linux ones, for example- but none work so simply and as comprehensively as Gmail-Backup. So, for now, I’ll leave it there -all my images, documents, and emails, sent and received, dating back to 2003 now safely stored on my own servers once more.
It’s kind of liberating… and it allows me, finally, to do this:
