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Shouldn't this be "imap to sqlite" or something? Why tie it to one specific email provider?



Because _it is_ specific to Gmail. It's using OAuth and presumable API access.

IMAP is much harder, and much slower, and is bound by Google's bandwidth limits.


Doing a mbox export with Google Takeout from gmail is pretty fast.


What? You have to schedule it, they literally wait 3 days before they start it, and then it can take most of a day to get it ready for download. It is not fast.


I've never had to wait that long. I usually can download within 20 minutes and it's 15 GB of data.


I've never had that experience. You don't need to schedule anything, and it takes maybe part of an hour to be ready to download?

Maybe there have been times when it was broken or under high demand though?


FWIW, for several years I've tried backuping my gmail account with imap (including some stuff made specifically for gmail): It never succeeded. The best syncer were running for one month, and after one month it hit some mails that it simply couldn't retrieve? Like I guess it was in too cold storage and timeout-ed? I don't know.

So I can understand why using Google's proprietary API might work better (or not, I don't know)

Anyway, as a sibling says, nowadays Google Takeout includes mbox and work properly (and is pretty fast, like half a day), but doesn't allow continuous update.

And I migrated to another mail provider (infomaniak), and I've thanked myself for using my own mail domain name years earlier.


I had the same problem when I switched off Google. I didn't have a ton of data, and I just wanted content for past search purposes, so I didn't dig into how the data would be transformed but I can at least offer my scuffed solution.

I installed a third-party client (Thunderbird, but I imagine any would work) on a local box, signed in with both emails, and just copied the mail over from one to the other. Low-tech, but it worked quite well. I may have forced some local cache/download for the original email, but I can't recall. I'll check later if it preserves headers and the like. I assume it would, but it wasn't that important to me.

I actually thought about writing at some point about the process of getting off gmail and all the funny things I ran across.


Did you use imapsync?

https://imapsync.lamiral.info/




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