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Comment by sufehmi | Hacker News Reader

Honest question - how do you guys move away from Gmail?

I've been trying, twice, to download my (120 thousands of) email from Gmail. Both failed.

It'll download only about 500 emails per download, then I have to stop for like 10 minutes. Otherwise Gmail will block it.

Even then it'll still fail - after days of downloading, suddenly it'd only download the newest emails.

Any hints?

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I believe Google Takeout produces your emails in mbox-format.

Dead easy to re-import that to another provider using a pythonscript or something.

Just remember to set up a gmail forward to your new provider for any straggling emails.

This is interesting - will give this a try. Thanks !

Google Takeout works really well, but you can also connect using IMAP or POP3 to download all your emails with an email client like Thunderbird.

Then, if you've setup a new email account with another provider, you can connect using IMAP and copy your emails that way.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-gmail

POP3 always fail when you have so much emails: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30485039

IMAP only download the index - everytime you click on an email, it'll then download it. When you have 150K emails, then you need to click on all that emails 150K times.

I used Synology backup for google services to back up my emails and migrated to Fastmail. They have an import tool that seemed to work well.

Then there's the issue of the email client - I'm using Linux. I heard Thunderbird is a mess.

Sylpheed is so old.

Claws email is supposed to be better - but everytime after downloading email, it will lock up for a long time, while it's going through the filters.

With 120 thousand emails, and need for GUI / modern email client, it seems my options are ather limited.

Thinking of using Eudora with Wine.

Any ideas?

I think my thunderbird downloaded 50k emails via imap just fine.

IMAP just download the index, not the content.

When you click on an email - then it'll download that email. Attachment is also probably you have to click it too.

That's just not feasible when you (turned out to have) nearly 150 K emails in your Gmail account.

OK I found out a feature in Thunderbird called "Offline Work" - it seems to cause it to download the whole emails.

Currently giving this a try, fingers crossed.

With Fastmail I just gave them access to my gmail account and it ran an import task which eventually moved it all over.

Thanks guys - but I'd like to have my own copy of my emails.

Been bitten by SaaS in the past. Currently in the process of having my own local backup of all SaaS.

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