downloading gmails

toothpicks@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 38 points –

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!

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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!

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

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.