Google Hacks 2Nd Edition [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 75. Export Your Gmail

Back up or export your Gmail messages to your
computer for safe-keeping or offline reading .

You're nicely settled in to your new

Gmail account and may even have
brought over all of your email

Hack #74 since time began.
You're mailing up a storm, taking full advantage of
the one gigabyte of storage space you're allotted.

What, now, if you decide Gmail actually isn't for
you and you'd like to move out again, either to
another Web mail service or back to the more traditional email
application running on your computer? Or perhaps you just want a
local archive of your Gmail for safe-keeping or offline trawling when
you're on a plane and desperately need a copy of
that meeting report.

A nifty little archiving script packaged with the libgmail
(http://libgmail.sourceforge.net)
Python interface to Gmail Section 6.13[Hack
#80 is just the ticket. It logs into your Gmail account for you,
looks around, prompts you to select a collection of messages to
archive, and downloads them to your laptop or desktop.

6.8.1. Installing the Hack

There's really nothing to do beyond downloading
(http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=113492,
or click the Downloads link on the libgmail home page) and unstuffing
the libgmail archive (http://libgmail.sourceforge.net).

The only requirement for libgmail is Python (http://www.python.org).

6.8.2. Running the Hack

Among

libgmail's
demo applications is archive.py, a script that
logs into Gmail, downloads your email messages, and saves them on
your computer's hard drive in a format (Mbox)
suitable for importing into many an email program:

On the command line (whether that be the Windows DOS-alike, Mac OS
X's Terminal, or Unix shell), run the archive script
like so:

$ python demos/archive.py

You'll be prompted for your Gmail account name and
password, after which libgmail will log you in:

Gmail account name: 
raelity  
Password:
Please wait, logging in...
Log in successful.

There we are. At this point you can choose to archive just
what's in your inbox (0), all
messages (2), starred, drafts, sent, or a
particular set of labeled messages (6 and
7 in my case). Choose the associated number and
hit the return key on your keyboard:

WARNING:root:Live Javascript and constants file versions differ.
Select folder or label to archive: (Ctrl-C to exit)
Note: *All* pages of results will be archived.
0. inbox
1. starred
2. all
3. drafts
4. sent
5. spam
6. foo
7. Peeps
Choice: 2

Libgmail begins slurping your messages out of Gmail, one by one, and
downloading them to an archive file in the current directory on your
computer.

As is stated by he program at the outset, "*All* pages of results will be archived," meaning that all messages in the collection you've chosen will be downloaded, not just those that fit on a single page when you're looking at that collection through the standard Gmail web browser interface.

ff602fe48d89bc3 1 \<b\>Hello from Hotmail\</b\>
ff602fe48d89bc3 1 Hello from Hotmail
ff5fb9c2829c165 1 Hello Gmail via Gmail Loader
ff5fb9c2829c165 1 Hello Gmail via Gmail Loader
ff5691f7170cb62 1 Hello Gmail via Gmail Loader
ff5691f7170cb62 1 Hello Gmail via Gmail Loader
ff3f4310237b607 1 Howdy gmail-lite
ff3f4310237b607 1 Howdy gmail-lite
ff39c1fc71abbf1 1 Hello from Gmail mobile
ff39c1fc71abbf1 1 Hello from Gmail mobile
...
fbd0c388dd1684e 1 Hello, Gmail
fbd0c388dd1684e 1 Hello, Gmail
fbd0c1db3bcffe2 1 Gmail is different. Here's what you need to know.
fbd0c1db3bcffe2 1 Gmail is different. Here's what you need to know.
Select folder or label to archive: (Ctrl-C to exit)
Note: *All* pages of results will be archived.
0. inbox
1. starred
2. all
3. drafts
4. sent
5. spam
6. foo
7. Peeps
Choice: ^C
Done.

And we're done. Choose another collection to
download and archive if you wish; otherwise, press Control-C on your
keyboard to stop the archive.py script.

Now, if you look in the directory from which you invoked
archive.py, you should see a new Mbox-format
archive (the one I just created is
archive-all-1096849647.72.mbox) of your chosen
collection of messages, suitable for importing into many an email
program:

jane:~/Desktop/libgmail-0.0.8 rael$ ls
ANNOUNCE                        constants.pyc
CHANGELOG                       demos
README                          libgmail.py
archive-all-1096849647.72.mbox  lib

6.8.3. See Also

gmail.py
(http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2004/06/18/1751)
is a simple Python interface to Gmail, focusing on exporting raw
messages for backup and import.