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I wrote this a few years ago to archive my Gmail emails to text files (and the attachments to whatever they are).

I haven't ran it in awhile but when I did it worked and was able to download my emails from the very beginning without crashing. Anyway, you might find it useful...

http://github.com/Jaymon/Popbak

I have been using Zimbra Desktop as an email client, http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop.html, in my Mac in several GMail accounts with no problem. There are versions for Window and Linux.

So use getmail_fetch through the POP server; it downloads a few hundred at a time into a maildir format. Hard to get more convenient and storable than that (tar it up and gzip or 7zip it).