1y ago

downloading gmails

my gmail account is full, most of the space is emails. I tried to download them through "takeout" and it has an option that says hey let's split this up into 2GB chunks. And you select that and it sends you one 12GB .mbox file regardless. The 12GB download keeps failing and now it says you've already downloaded these files too many times. Like gimme a break. Anyone have any experience with this? Any ways to get around the download failing or to force it to send you smaller chunks? Suchhhh a pain.

I hope to move to a different mail thing at some boint. I know y'all are gonna tell me don't use gmail dont use gmail lol.

Thanks!

22 comments

Local mail client (Thunderbid) - IMAP/POP - sync.
Once done, move to a local folder and delete from Gmail.
You can just backup the Thunderbird profile, if you want to keep the mails safe
- Thanks, I've set up Thunderbird using POP. Does it just download everything automatically when you first login? Thank yiu!
  
  You'll want to use IMAP, not POP3. While the former can see and manage folders, move items between them, add and remove stuff at will etc., the latter can just download and optionally delete messages from the inbox.
  In short: IMAP lets you manage all of your stuff, POP3 can only make a local copy of the inbox.
  
  Look into the differences between POP and iMap. One saves a local copy of everything(pop), the other just checks in with a given mail server(imap) and caches a desired amount of emails.
  There’s some other key differences but for what you’re wanting to do I’d recommend POP

I'm sorry I have nothing helpful to add, other than congratulating you on the achievement of filling up a Gmail account. That is impressive.
Google should send out awards for that. Like, if you get a Youtube play button for having 1 million subscribers, they should give you some kind of "I'll get to it later" button for having 1 million unread emails in your inbox.
- This happened with me couple of years ago and I had to pay for space 🤦
- 😂😂😂

Any ways to get around the download failing
I did this incredibly stupid procedure with Firefox yesterday as a workaround for a failing Google Takeout download:
backup the .part file from the failed download
restart the download (careful -- if you didn't move/back it up, it will be deleted and you will have to download the whole thing again; found this out the hard way on a 50GB+ file... that failed again)
immediately pause the new download after it starts writing to disk
replace the new .part file with the old .part file from earlier (or -- see [1] below)
Firefox might not show progress for a long time, but will eventually continue the download (I saw it reading the file back from disk with iotop so I just let it run)
sanity check that you actually got the whole thing and that it is usable (in my case, I knew a hash for the file)
[1] You can actually replace the new .part file with anything that has the same size in bytes as the old file -- I replaced it with a file full of zeros and manually merged the end onto the original .part file with a tiny custom python script since I had already moved the incomplete file to other media before realizing I could try this. (In my case, the incomplete file would still have been useful even with the last 1MB cut off.)
There are probably better options in most cases -- like Thunderbird for mailbox as other people suggested, or rclone for getting stuff from Drive -- but if you need to get Takeout to work and the download keeps failing this may be another option to try.
- THANK YOU! This seems to have worked. Now I just have to figure out how what to do with the .mbox file.

In addition what others have already said, in the Gmail search bar it can search for mails that have an attachment larger than x mb. I did that some time ago and there where a lot large mails that were not worth it to save on disk

One way to do it is with ImapSync: https://imapsync.lamiral.info
- Yeah I'd use imapsync or mbsync for this.
  Just keep in mind that Gmail has a documented 2.5GB per day limit for IMAP downloads. In reality, the limit is smaller. When I was migrating away from GSuite, it took me 8-9 days to download 14GB of email. I downloaded imapsync and ran it on my server.

Maybe you could install a local mail client like Thunderbird and connect it to your Gmail via POP3? POP will download the mails and delete them from the server. Then you'll just have to figure out how to export the mails from Thunderbird/your client of choice.
EDIT: This article contains relevant information.
EDIT 2: Alternativly you could just use IMAP instead of POP to download everything and then delete the mails from the server manually.

I like to backup my mails with Mailstore Home and put the data on my NAS, maybe give it a try

Same problem here, no solution. I'll watch and see what people suggest...

I use mbsync for that.

Thanks y'all

Do yous think I need to have any concerns about the compatibility of the .mbox file in future years or can I just leave it like that?
- If it's a Unix mbox file you'll probably be fine - that format hasn't changed in decades and is just as unlikely to change in the foreeeable future. There may be an additional step involved if you want to import it to, say, Thunderbird 2032.
  
  Thank you!!

When I downloaded my Google Photos content I just grabbed the links and added them to JDownloader, which can usually resume partial downloads. There are also download manager extensions for most browsers, maybe give one of those a try.
- Can you offer more details? I want to get a backup of my photos and takeout is a fraud.

22 comments