Download an archive of messages from gmail

Despite the 15 Gb are allocated by the Gmail service, it often happens that the number of mails received (and, too often, the heavy attachments associated with them) is because of the space available.

Here are a few tips to archive and export your mails and thus make breathe your storage space on Gmail.

The sorting and creation of “Labels”

To archive their old mails to make room would require a sort. The search tool of Google is relatively powerful to do this.

Here is a fairly comprehensive list of available search filters : diseinuak4web.net?hl=fr

Has to know that one can combine several filter different.

Example by date

For example, to filter all messages that are older than 2yrs, just type in the search field of the email : older_than:2y

2y means 2yrs. You can use m for the month, and d for days. Thus, older_thanm will filter the emails older than the last 10 months.

You can also select a specific date with before/01/01

Used alone, this filter will select all the emails that meet the filter, without making the distinction between mails sent, mails or e-mails already classified. It may be interesting to only purge emails that are in the inbox and which have not already been sorted in a label with the following combination : older_than:2y has:nouserlabels-in:inbox (it is, in general, e-mails, which represent the largest volume and which are not consulted).

Assigning a label and archiving

A time the filter runs, you can select all in mail filtered to assign a new label “inbox_” for example. The name should be enough speaking for a better find in his backups.

Attention: Take good care to click on “Select all those that correspond to this search” if the message is displayed.

Once assigned, go on to the new label, select all messages and click on Archive in the menu above. The fact of archiving the mails helps the out of the box in main reception by removing their label automatic “Inbox“.

Your wording now contains the emails ready to be exported.

Export via Google Takeout

The service from Google that allows you to export its data (emails, drive, photos etc) of your account is called Google Takeout. You can access it from this address : diseinuak4web.net

This service allows you to make an archive of your data for export and store it on your hard drive.

• By default, all Google services are selected. What will interest us here is the E-mail, uncheck all via the button “select none” and then enable only the E-mails.
• To the left of the activation button, an arrow button allows you to access more options, including the export thematic labels. “Select which labels will allow, and to select only our emails beforehand sorted.
• Once the selection is made, click on “Next” at the bottom of the page to find the type of file you want (the .zip is more convenient).
• Select also the maximum size of the archive (the archives exceeding this size mentioned will be split into several files).
• To finish off, select the mode of storage, for export to hard disk, select “Send download link via e-mail”.

At the end of the procedure, the archive will be created (this may take a few minutes to several hours depending on the volume of mails).Once the email is received, download your archive.

The format of the archive is a .mbox, which can easily be imported into an email client (Thunderbird, MboxViewer) to view the archives.

At the end of the export, the download of the archive and its verification, you can delete the content label of breathing in your in-box to mail.

Translated by diseinuak4web.netate and Global Translator