So, yes, of course, you can download individual emails in Gmail, and attachments in Gmail,
but you can also download all emails in Gmail.
In other words, you can download all your Gmail data in its entirety.
So, this is how to download all emails in Gmail.
Hey friends!
I’m Tasia Custode and welcome back to my YouTube Channel where I share tech tips, app
reviews, and so much Gmail content you may begin to question my sanity.
Today, I’m showing you how to download Gmail data.
So, let’s go.
So first things first, as I mentioned before, you can download individual emails in Gmail
and I’m going to quickly show you how to do that first, then we’ll download everything.
So here’s how to download an email in Gmail.
So from Gmail, open the email you want to download.
From here, click on the three vertical dots in the top right, and simply select ‘download
message’.
This will download the email as an EML file, which is basically an email in file form.
You can open this file type with Outlook or another email client.
But quick tip for my fellow mac users, or anyone that’s having an issue opening the
EML file!
You can quickly change the EML file to an MHT file and that will allow it to be opened
as a webpage, so you can quickly view it in your browser.
And downloading an attachment is even easier.
So, from the message that has the attachment you want to download, scroll down to the bottom
of the email where the attachments are, and just hover your mouse over the attachment
and click on the download icon - which is the downward pointing arrow.
Now, the attachment has been downloaded to your computer.
And now, what we’ve all been waiting for.
You can export and download your data from Gmail.
So, essentially you can download any data that hasn’t been deleted.
This includes messages in your inbox, unread messages, sent and starred messages, messages
in the spam and trash folders, chat messages, drafts, and more.
Like, everything.
So, here’s how to download all emails in Gmail.
So step one is to head to Google Takeout, by typing in takeout.google.com.
And I’ll put this link in the description below so you have quick access to it.
From here, if you're signed into your Google account, then all Google products that have
your data will be listed here and automatically selected.
So, you could download your data from these other Google services too, not just Gmail,
like your contacts and Drive, Google Photos, and so on.
But for today, we are just talking emails in Gmail.
So what we will do is scroll up to the top of this list to uncheck all of these items.
So, just click on deselect all.
Now let’s scroll back down to Mail and toggle on the option to download our Gmail data.
So this is for the messages and attachments in your Gmail account.
So if you click on the multiple formats option you can learn a bit more about the file formats.
So the email messages will download as MBOX and the user settings will download as JSON
- this is just like your metadata.
Now if we click on the all mail data included option, we’ll get a snapshot of what exactly
is going to be downloaded here.
So by default we’ve got this include all messages in Mail toggled on, but you could
deselect that and just toggle on the individual labels and inboxes that you want to download.
Obviously, if you’re downloading everything, this is going to take more time and way more
space as you can imagine.
So if you just want to download messages in your inbox you could toggle that on.
Either way, once you’ve selected all or some of these options, scroll down and select
‘next step’.
Here is where you can customize your archive format.
So we’re going to choose our file type, frequency and destination.
So we can decide if we want to just export this once or every 2 months for a year.
Then we can select the file type and size.
So I’d recommend zip as they can be opened pretty much on any computer.
Then here where it’s got the gigabits opinion, this is just to help you if you have a ton
of emails and it’s going to be a huge massive download, this will split it up into multiple
files for you.
So once you’ve got everything set as you want, we’ll click on ‘create export’.
So this will take some time to download everything, especially if you have thousands and thousands
of emails.
What Google is doing is creating a copy of the files for you and then Google Takeout
will email you when your export is complete.
And keep in mind this could literally take days.
But, once this is complete, you’re going to get an email from Google that contains
a link to your data archive.
Mine for example took about an hour to download just my inbox, so be patient if you’re doing
literally all your data.
But this is what the email looks like and if you had a ton of data, you’re going to
have multiple exports here that you can download.
So you can download right from here or you can click on ‘manage exports’ where then
we can download all the data right from here.
So we’re going to have our export list and we can simply download what we want.
Now to actually read these files, there’s another important step.
Remember these are mbox files, so you can open them using Apple Mail, or some other
email clients, but things get a bit tricky for other applications with this file format.
So you can download Thunderbird, an email app, in order to view these files.
And I’ve got a link to thunderbird below as well.
This is a free download by the way and it works across systems.
So once you’ve downloaded Thunderbird go ahead and open that app up.
And add your email address to thunderbird, or you can create a new one if you want from
here.
But once that’s all set up, now we want to add our mbox files to thunderbird.
So, first we have to go to tools and select add-ons.
Here, we are going to search for importexporttools all one word.
And we want to add this importexporttools NG to thunderbird.
So just follow the steps for that.
So now once we’ve added this extension to thunderbird, we can head to tools, then importexportNG,
then we’ll select ‘import mbox file’.
You’ll have a bunch of options in the import popup, but the default option will be fine
so just click on OK.
Then from here, let’s choose the mbox files that we downloaded.
Now, just like when we initially exported all our emails from Gmail and we had to be
patient, we’re going to have to be patient here as well and give thunderbird some time
to import these files into thunderbird.
And through the magic of editing, here are all the emails we downloaded from Gmail now
in thunderbird in a readable format.
So, we basically exported all of these from Gmail, and now have the carbon copies for
lack of a better term over here in Thunderbird.
And you can play around with the formatting a bit too if you need to.
So remember, I’ve got links to Google Takeout and Thunderbird listed below.
And also a whackload of other Gmail videos as well, if you just can’t get enough.
So that’s how to download all emails in Gmail.
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I know!
Can you believe it?
Thanks so much for watching.
See ya next time!