
Google turns on "Download Gmail Archive" feature - thejerz
https://www.google.com/settings/takeout
======
rzendacott
I'm very impressed with the number of products and services supported so far.
It has everything from bookmarks to location history. It even lets you choose
the format for some products, and Drive in particular has some nice options.
I'm glad to see Google opening this tool up.

~~~
f_salmon
Plot twist:

For NSA too.

~~~
blowski
Seriously, please keep the NSA comments to NSA articles. I know the NSA issue
is important, but yammering on about it in every article is the same as a
Bible-bashing Christian raising the topic of Jesus in every single
conversation.

And I am Christian, and I do think the NSA issue is important.

~~~
psbp
I had a moment of paranoia a few months back where I thought it was concerted
attempt to trivialize the issue, but then I realized it's just a way to get
cheap laughs/upvotes.

~~~
blueskin_
Or it's a way to keep it on people's minds - that isn't mutually exclusive
with having a few laughs, I guess I can see that more easily than others
coming from a nation with a long history of self-deprecating and dark humour,
but it's by no means a unique phenomenon.

------
jgalt212
For large archives, 10GB in our case, we had issues exporting to gzip or bzip2
--it would crash before the archive was completed. Sort of annoying in that it
took almost 24 hours from the start of the archive creation to the crash
event. The help desk could not resolve the issue for us. Originally, we chose
gzip/bzip2 formats instead of getting a series of files with zip (i.e. zip max
file size is 4GB)

At end of the day, we had success choosing the zip archive format. We did not
receive a series of zip files, but just one large uncompressed text file in
mbox format.

Our last big data dump was down back in late December 2013, so I am not sure
if these issues persist regarding bzip/gzip2 and 10GB size archives.

------
antifuchs
Easy prediction: they'll disable imap access within a year.

~~~
eli
I never really understood why anyone would want to use GMail but NOT use the
web interface. I mean, it's cool that they offer it, but I don't recall it
working especially well.

~~~
kijin
A lot of people have more than one email account (personal, work, school,
etc.) and not all of them are Gmail accounts.

Currently, the easiest way to manage multiple email accounts at the same time
is by using a standalone IMAP client. Five accounts in the sidebar that I can
access with a single click, with Unified Inbox at the top!

Gmail's web interface only lets you access one email account at a time. You
could have delegated accounts, but they open in a separate tab, and the whole
concept of delegation only works for Gmail accounts anyway. Or you could
forward everything to your Gmail account and call it a day, but some employers
might have a problem with that, especially in light of Google's apparently
comfy relationship with No Such Agency.

Personally, I use my Gmail address to subscribe to public newsgroups, but I
wouldn't let anything private ever touch a Google server. With a standalone
IMAP client, it's very easy to maintain this kind of separation without having
to suffer any noticeable inconvenience.

~~~
djim
Gmail can get mail from other accounts via pop or imap.

------
grandpoobah
I ran it and it gave me a zip containing an html file called errors.html with
a bunch of errors and no actual emails.

~~~
hugi
Tried running it twice, all I get are emails informing me they can't do it (
[http://i.imgur.com/zlFgQX4.png](http://i.imgur.com/zlFgQX4.png) ).

~~~
lutusp
This error might have come up because you have an open Gmail client session
running (or another Google service), or simply that the new service is
completely overloaded right now.

------
magicalist
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6855145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6855145)

~~~
thejerz
Yes -- just to be clear, the submission you link to occurred before Google
released the Gmail export feature.

~~~
gst
I've used the Gmail export feature weeks ago - this does not appear to be
anything new.

~~~
nolok
It (gmail export) was slowly deployed to more and more accounts over the last
few weeks

------
personlurking
If I wanted to download my mbox file from Gmail and reupload it at a later
date to Gmail (possibly another of my accounts), I could do that without a
problem, right? Or will they just be a jumble of emails, out of order or
something? I suppose at the least, they won't retain their labels.

------
emilyst
I'm glad they've rolled this out widely, but unfortunately, when I attempted
to use it, it simply sent me a 5MB error log and not a single bit of archived
data.

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blackjack48
If I'm already using gmvault, is there any advantage to downloading it
directly?

------
vicaya
Anybody here tried this at all?

I tried to get a takeout with my emails several times, all I got is on 2.3MB
errors.html, telling "service cannot retrieve this item" over and over again.

~~~
snowmaker
Same here.

------
chmars
The new option is great but I am still very happy with a (payware) app called
CloudPull. It can automatically backup all your Google Apps data and is not
limited to Gmail but also covers Drive.

[http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/](http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/)

CloudPull is OS X only. I'm sure there're are other great options to create
Gmail backups independent from Google

------
brohoolio
Am I missing something new? Hasn't this been in place for couple months?

~~~
thejerz
When they announced it, it did not support Gmail. (Or many of the other Google
services)

~~~
thrownaway2424
Takeout was announced in 2011. Takeout for Gmail was announced in December
2013. Gmail has always supported POP and IMAP which are functionally
equivalent to or superior to the MBOX archive format provided by Takeout, for
most purposes.

------
jebblue
I've had 4 "Failed - Network error" messages in a row.

~~~
waterhouse
I have twice created an archive with my Hangouts data, and the archive
contained only an errors.html file explaining that Hangouts.json failed with a
"Service failed to retrieve this item" message. I left "feedback" saying so. I
guess we'll see where this goes.

~~~
waterhouse
All right, finally got a nonempty archive. Looks like it's probably complete.
Seems fairly legit. However, there is one thing that confuses me so far. Looks
like a lot of links get a link_target attribute that is different from the
actual link:

    
    
      {
       "type" : "LINK",
       "text" : "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Letter_Mail_Company",
       "link_data" : {
         "link_target" : "http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2%2F\
                          en.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F\
                          American_Letter_Mail_Company\
                          &sa=D&sntz=1&usg=[alphanumeric token scrubbed]",
         "display_url" : "http://en.wikipedia.org\
                          /wiki/American_Letter_Mail_Company"
        }
      }
    

However, links to Youtube, or Google, or any subdomain of either, have a
link_target attribute identical to their display_url. In-teresting. I wonder
what that alphanumeric token is. It's like how Google search results also
have, rather than normal links, links to google.com/url?[a ton of URL
parameters]. I assume the latter is so they can gather data about what URLs
are clicked in the search results, or possibly pasted elsewhere, and
conceivably to discourage scraping. And as for this?

Perhaps it's a kludge for Google chat clients, which need to parse URLs (they
do something special with Youtube links) and might be thus freed to do it
stupidly. Perhaps Google wants to know what people do with their downloaded
Hangout archives. Perhaps Google wants to know what people do with Hangout
history in the browser, and they've changed the links in that archive, and
then they just leave it that way in the exported format. --Turns out Hangout
history in the browser has exactly those links... I'm guessing it's the last
one. Well, at any rate, at least it's easy to ignore that field.

------
bumpy
I think this is Google's half hearted/half assed attempt at allaying the fears
of those concerned about 'what Google might do next'. As a lot of you who have
tried to export out have seen, this does not work satisfactorily or does not
work at all! (See other's experiences in this thread).

I myself tried to export gmail contacts out and found it does not work as
expected and does not work at all for groups. Nor does it export full data in
vc, like contact photos. Why not? It's supported in the file format so why not
add it?

Seems like they're making the fixing of export-out bugs a low priority. So low
that its not even working at all for some. To me all this seems like
deliberate negligence.

------
jason_slack
I'm getting "Service failed to retrieve this item."

For every item I tried to export.

------
kmfrk
I hope it will one day include my YouTube (favourites) - as I still get an
empty result for archiving my YouTube profile. It requires Google+ to access
that now, from what I've tried to research on it.

------
nikbackm
What can you do with the downloaded mail archive?

Would it be possible to load/import it into Thunderbird and get to view all
the same folders as in Gmail now for example?

------
amiramir
I'll just ask the NSA for mine ;-)

~~~
onida
Who do you think they created this feature for?

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PhasmaFelis
Is this new? I'm pretty sure it's been around in some form for a couple of
years at least.

~~~
moonka
Gmail was announced several weeks ago (maybe December?) as coming to Takeout,
and last time I checked I didn't have it enabled, but now I do. It's by far my
biggest file, my last export of all the services I was able to download was
~100MB, but this is at 3.5GB and climbing.

------
tanglesome
This has been true since Dec. See:
[http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/download-copy-of-
your-...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/download-copy-of-your-gmail-
and-google.html)

------
anilshanbhag
I just requested an archive and I will be surprised if I get it any time soon.
Gmail - 5GB, Drive - 3 GB, G+ Photos - 1.5 GB - this is going to be one huge
zip file !!

~~~
bwillard
Just as an FYI Takeout's zip files are limited to 2GB (for compatibility
reasons) so you'll actually get a couple zip files, if you want just one file
you need to pick one of the other archive formats.

------
coldtea
Perhaps preparing to turn off 'IMAP access' feature?

~~~
porpoisemonkey
Not likely. You can only create a backup once every 24 hours which would be
useless for importing into a mail client.

~~~
krrrh
I think the idea here is that now they could turn off IMAP and not be accused
of lock-in, whereas IMAP used to eh the only way to liberate your email.

They won't turn off IMAP of course, because they would anger way too many
mobile users.

------
biafra
It might be a coincident. But since I started creating an archive I do not get
any more email to that account. And it already takes some hours.

------
equivocates
Is there anyway to download using wget or curl? Google chrome isn't cutting
mustard. After about 4 gigs, it gives me a fat error.

~~~
Shish2k
> After about 4 gigs, it gives me a fat error.

That sounds more likely to be an issue with your local storage (4GB being the
limit for files on a FAT-formatted hard drive, IIRC). Though on the other
hand, somebody still using FAT in this day and age seems a fairly unlikely
explanation too :S

------
LeicaLatte
They took their time but this does look like the right way to do it.

------
blueskin_
I'm surprised google are making it _easier_ to escape.

------
treelovinhippie
1.4MB file. I don't think it worked lol

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qwerta
You should create backup every month...

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intull
Wasn't this there before?

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shmerl
Useful but you could do it with IMAP already.

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notastartup
anyone else getting just a zip of error.html which contains whole bunch of
"Service failed to retrieve this item." for all emails?

~~~
pseingatl
Or worse: system "got" 7 gigs, still in progress, refresh page, 7 gigs
disappear.

~~~
notastartup
now I'm getting this

    
    
        Sorry you have have reached the maximum number of archive
        creations allowed per day. You can try again tomorrow.

