Can I export gmail messages to text or html files?

Question

I want to be able to export gmail messages as text or html files so that they can be stored, passed around, and easily viewed later. I would really like to be able to locate a selection of my messages (e.g. by tag, by sender, etc.) and export them all at once. Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

The key is configuring your account to be accessible via IMAP.

I've used IMAPSize to backup GMail accounts. To schedule regular backups on a server I use OfflineIMAP.

Although a quick G search reveals tons of tools/scripts/services to do backup of IMAP servers and especially of GMail.

Answer 2

There is an 'organization' dedicated to this called the Data Liberation Front. They are working through all the Google products and will continue to update their site as new methods or improved methods for moving data in and out of web applications are created.

Answer 3

Similar to @LBushkin's suggestion, use a local pop client, but use Thunderbird. Outlook uses a proprietary format for its local data store.

Emails are saved as plain text files, one file per folder.

Answer 4

In Google Labs enable create a document, then go back to the thread you want to export as a document and click 'create a document'.

then in Google documents you can save the resulting document as HTML (zipped) or your can download it as plain text amongst a number of other formats.

Answer 5

I have had success using IMAP Tools to backup other (non-Gmail) IMAP accounts. I used both imapdump.pl and IMAPToMbox.pl; they generate one text file per email or one text file per folder, respectively. Both commands allow specifying which IMAP folders (Gmail's tags) you want to back up.

This method suits me well, 'cause I can backup my account automatically (say, a cron job) without my intervention.

Answer 6

The easiest way may be to use a local POP client like Outlook to download them. Then you can easily export or save them to text.

For an individual email, you could use Print to print the contents to a file on your machine... but that would get painful quickly for more than a few emails.

Answer 7

I access gmail with a mail client which stores email in the maildir format. Maildir simply stores each email in its original RFC822 message format in a separate file. These are readable text files, although modern email is often cluttered with base64 encoded mail attachments.

There are multiple gnu/linux email clients which support maildir, including Evolution which is the standard mail client in the Ubuntu distribution. However, there are no Windows email clients supporting maildir that I know of.

Answer 8

Here's a link to a post by Matt Cutts on a related topic from a couple of years back http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/backup-gmail-in-linux-with-getmail/

Answer 9

Hi - I am one of the authors of BackupGoo. We also wanted to have a secure offline copy of our data. BackupGoo is really simple to use and backups all you stuff from Google to your local harddrive in widely-used formats. This includes e.g. GMail, Google Docs, Google Reader. GMail for instance is saved as plain text WMime-Message" that can be viewed in any text editor or offline email client.

Answer 10

Hi - I am one of the authors of BackupGoo. We also wanted to have a secure offline copy of our data. BackupGoo is really simple to use and backups all your stuff from Google to your local harddrive in widely-used formats. This includes e.g. GMail, Google Docs, Google Reader. GMail for instance is saved as plain text "Mime-Message" that can be viewed in any text editor or offline email client.