Notice that Google Takeout is broken with regards to non-UTF8 email encodings (for some of you who archive old emails). I noticed it when coding a small tool https://github.com/karteum/gmvaultdb to (among other things) import the mbox from Takeout into an sqlite DB : Google performs some encoding conversions that permanently break all non-ascii characters in non-UTF8 emails (they are all replaced by 0xEFBFBD). In order to archive old emails, I had to use mbsync with IMAP (gmvault does not work anymore with Python 3, and I didn't try yet https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back ).