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Comment by rollypolly | Hacker News Reader

User since 2004. Wow. Is there a way to export tens of thousands of emails from Gmail?

Yes, any email client will make a local copy of your Google emails.

If you use multiple operating systems, or you want to use a high quality open source client, best choice is Thunderbird (this is what I use).

On Windows the default email client is Outlook.

On Mac, iPhone, iPad the default email client is named Mail.

All of the above email clients will save your emails from Gmail on your HDD.

The OS X Mail.app does an excellent job of backing up your Gmail account using the standard POP3 and IMAP protocols.

Every email I've received in the last eight years is stored on my MacBook, indexed in Spotlight, backed up in Time Machine, and available for offline reading whenever I need it. If my Gmail account was suspended tomorrow it would be a nuisance, but I would not lose any data and could recover from it quickly enough.

http://www.dataliberation.org/

If you're on a Mac, DEVONthink Pro Office has an option to import email into a database. The archive option in DEVONthink keeps all the attachments and everything, and you can easily search for an open an email, and it will open in your local mail client.

I've found it very helpful.

Well, there's IMAP and POP. That should do the trick.

I used getmail: http://datalinkcontrol.net/dlc/content/gmail-backup-getmail (Leave out the password from the config to be prompted when you run getmail.)

This guide show you how: http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/export-all-email-from-gmail/

I tried this, but Thunderbird simply locked up due to the sheer volume of emails (I subscribe to LKML and other high-volume mailing lists). I haven't been able to find any good backup solution anywhere, and articles like this really scare me.

Thunderbird 11 is much better than Thunderbird 3.x was at handling a GMail backup. I've just finished backing up ~120,000 messages using Thunderbird 11 (archiving them into monthly folders about once an hour during the backup), and it's doing fine. (I tried the same thing a year ago with Thunderbird and gave up after 45 minutes.)

good to hear. I had tried THunderbird in the past but it would just crash. Just started today for first time in a year and just upgraded from V7 to v11. Working good so far.

Try getmail. I've used it to suck down a very large amount of mail.

I prefer fdm[1], but I agree that cli mail fetch tools are great for this.

[1]: http://fdm.sourceforge.net/

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