How do I migrate almost twenty years of email off of Gmail?
I have followed numerous discussions on here lately regarding extracting oneself from being Google-reliant, and they've all deeply resonated with me. For years now I've been slowly migrating numerous Google-bound things over to my own self-hosted alternatives. I've moved my storage, contacts, documents, and some (but sadly not all) of my calendars to home solutions, fairly easily too.
But the biggest hurdle I've been facing this whole time, the one I've been putting off the longest, is the act of figuring out how to get almost twenty years of mail archive and history on my primary account away from Google and into a space where I can access it separately. I have been steadily changing the main email on my more active external accounts to a self-hosted one, and now only seeing a shrinking handful of lesser-used services still attached to the old gmail. But that history is too precious to me, and I still find multiple occasions where I need/want to reference some communications from long ago.
I've tried searching the web for options, but so far all combinations of my queries are either really elementary "here's how to set up a new email" crap, or else aimed at moving from one Gmail account to another Gmail account. I've been thinking that the simplest approach might be just to set it up as a POP3 account in my mail client (eM Client, for the record), download it all, and then when I finally pull the plug just drag it into the local client archive, and then remove the account from the app. But I figure there have to be others who have done this, right?
You can use imapsync to sync GMail mails to a new mailbox. This is the option I used two years ago when I migrated out of GMail. It takes around 1 day per 2GB of mail you have. What I ended up doing was syncing the last 2-3GB and just leaving the rest as a hot backup in the old GMail account.
You could also use Google Takeout to download the email, which contains everything in MBOX format. I did this just to have a cold snapshot.
Thank you! imapsync seems to be up my alley. I'll have to give it a few tests this weekend. I appreciate the advice.
I would recommend you do both. Honestly a lot of it has to do with my general mistrust with the reliability of mail services in general. Takeout is sure to get you everything, and when moving services it's good to have a spare backup.
The mbox format is actually really useful; most OSes these days scrape the metadata from them so you can easily search through them to get what you're looking for.
Go to
https://takeout.google.com/
Select the "Mail" option. Google will prepare an archive for you with your all your mail in MBOX format. You can then import that MBOX file into your new mail client, for example Thunderbird.
Like you would eat an elephant: One piece at a time.
It's a slow process.
First, back up all the email you need. This already takes a long while, but it's worth it even if you would keep using gmail.
Then, make a new email account and use gmail redirect your mail there.
After that, just use the new one. Whenever you get a new mail from gmail for some random account, go change the email for that account.
Repeat until you don't get mail from gmail account as often, and just keep it like that.
If you try to do it all in few days, you will burn out. So let it move on slowly.
Out of curiosity what email platform are you moving to?
While I loathe Google, the one thing I’ll grant them is a pretty strong trust in their security team and practices. They’re not perfect in this regard, but I know they’re pretty good.
I’ve been a little hesitant to move to a new email provider, since its the single account that can cause the most damage (and pretty quickly) if compromised, since most things will delegate to email to recover an account.
Where are you headed? Because I’d love to de-Google myself, but e-mail seems like the hardest one for me to move just for that one concern.
I have been over the years moving more and more of my internet services to either those provided by my web host, those built into my home NAS, or a combination of both. For email specifically I'm using a combination of the web host's mail services plus some additional self-hosting tools on my Synology devices.
That’s helpful. I probably just need to dramatically expand my use of 2FA, and accept that email compromise is a potential vulnerability that needs to be mitigated.
Right now, I tend to still treat email compromise as a catastrophic failure that would lead to my compromise on many other accounts.
It’s hard, because there are still platforms that don’t support 2FA, that I wouldn’t want to lose in an email compromise.
Consider Fastmail! I moved there and it was EASY. I even replicated the workflow of Hey.
Just an observation but I have email with a local private provider and the space is pretty limited. It only allows me to save about a year's worth of email before it fills up and I have to go in and delete large emails or those with attachments. I notice that despite thinking that everything Ive written is 'important' that very very seldom do I run across anything that I really need to keep and I get pretty cavalier about deleting after a few minutes. I think only once in the last five years have I regretted deleting something I could've used and anything I need for tax purposes I keep offline. Your mileage may vary but just like paper files, 95% of the stuff that gets filed, never gets looked at again.
Thankfully I have no space restrictions in my new email accounts. It was an important consideration, definitely.
What service do you use, if you don't mind me asking?
I'm using a combination of the mail services provided by my web host, and additional self-hosting on my home servers.
Alas, I pretty regularly have to search through my old email for information. It was particularly invaluable for the immigration process, where I needed to be able to find information going way back, like details about all the places I've lived.
With everyone suggesting methods to take your emails out of Gmail, I think it's really important to keep in mind a quirk of labels. If you label a message, Gmail only labels that individual message, not the rest of the conversation/thread. Might not be important to you but you may think messages are missing if you're not expecting it. Tom Scott made a post and a video about it (Though the video is mainly about AI).
Google offers a service that allows you to export all of your info off of their services, Gmail looks to be included with it, though I'm not sure what the process look like and how easy it is to import into another service, but they at least help you get it off. You can get to it at: https://takeout.google.com/
I'll echo the comments about Google Takeout. I'm still working through my own migration. That being said I can't seem to find a good photos replacement. Immich is good but takes up a good chunk of my system resources on my admittedly old server. And nextcloud memories is fantastic, but tied to Nextcloud and that runs even worse on my server, so for now, it's out too.
What are your must-have features for a Photos replacement?
Basic editing like crop or rotate, real simple stuff. Easy sharing. Snappy interface. Automatic phone pic uploads. I do like the timeline feature of Google Photos (today, 7 years ago...) But that isn't a requirement.
I tried Photoprsim and they didn't even have editing at all. An now of course some features are behind a paywall.
Immich is the closest so far. Maybe I need to look at a dedicated microserver just for that.
Ah gotcha, thanks for clarifying. I don't need all of that so much so I just default to using the basic crop and rotate tool on my Samsung phone. I run a Synology NAS at home which serves as my VPN, and offers a lot of equivalent tools as Google (Calendar, Drive, Contacts, Photos auto-backup, etc). I tried NextCloud for a year or so, but really the constant maintenance and unfriendly administration tools, combined with a fairly elitist community of users, led to me giving up on that and switching to the Synology's dedicated replacement apps.
Nextcloud can be configured to run pretty well on older hardware. I know this because I've had to do on a couple of occasions now. Nginx & PHP 8+ makes a wonderful difference, as does the caching configuration.
If you've done all that already, then I'll get back in to my box :)
I have not. But I'm intrigued, tell me more. If you're willing.
I moved to zoho and they had a mechanism to copy from gmail (probably via IMAP). I’m sure most major providers have something similar
I just recently moved away from Gmail, and funny enough, the idea of taking my email with me never occurred to me as something I could do. I figured, I'd have the account there to reference if I ever needed to, since I'm not quite at the point where I will delete my Google account.
For anyone interested, here is what my journey away from Gmail was like:
I ended up going to Fastmail for $50 a year. I can't say I was as security conscious as you in my choice, but it came highly recommended and supports 2FA.
I have a default disposable email I use for things like getting discounts on websites for signing up for their email list. I also like their "email shortcuts", where as long as the email is @username.fastmail.com you can prepend it with anything (to be fair, I believe you can do this with Gmail as well).
The first thing I did was update my email for every account that I could, for example:
This way if my email is ever compromised and I start getting Spam, I can tell exactly where it came from. I can also easily update that email and block the old compromised address.
I have a lot of accounts, this took me almost a week. One thing that shocked me is how absolutely difficult it is to change emails with some services. Most you can easily do on their website, some I had to email or open a support ticket, the worst few I had to actually call and speak to someone. Finally, there were a few where it just wasn't possible to change it at all. For those I either just left it for dead, or made a new account with a new email.
I moved from Gmail to Fastmail years ago and haven't looked back. I just followed their guide at https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058752414-Migrate-to-Fastmail-from-Gmail and everything went fine.
I added a forward from my Gmail address to Fastmail and a saved search that shows me which places are still sending mail there. Then over about a year I went through that filter and changed the address to every site.
There are a few sites that, for some weird reason, use email address as a primary key somewhere and don't allow me to change it, otherwise I'm 100% on Fastmail.
As a side note, I'm still new here, and not understanding why someone changed "20" to "twenty" in my post title without my permission? It seems unnecessarily pedantic, and there is nothing at all I can find in the docs that enforce this kind of format. If this is a requirement, that's fine, I'd just really like to see some print on it that I can read and understand for future posts.
Might be to make the title adhere to a style guide for clarity, SEO purposes, or to aid future searches. Not sure.
Personally I think that if it's a text post, the title should be left as-is unless the title is completely unclear and updating it would be a clear improvement for all. I'm all for adjusting link posts because we don't necessarily want to carry over misinformation, sensationalism, etc. from a 3rd party site. But text posts feel more personal and should generally be left to the one posting it.
Just housekeeping, see "Betrayal" for more info: https://tild.es/169n
I just want to see a style guide is all. I've done freelance editing for years, and always had a style guide handy. If there is one here, I'd love to see it.
There isn't a style guide, but just from familiarity:
These changes are all committed in the topic log, so you can get a feel for it just by watching the usual house cleaning take place.
I always learned it like this: 10 or less, spell it out. 11 or more, write it numerically.
Spelling out eleven, twelve, nineteen, twenty, or anything above ten seems weird to me in any context except maybe a legal document/financial instrument.
Some style guides have different recommendations. Chicago suggests spelling out all numbers between zero and one hundred, for instance.
Thanks for the details! This is now my bookmarked Style Guide until such a time as a greater one exists.
I encourage @mycketforvirrad or @cfabbro to chime in if I've made any mistakes above.
Unless it is for a person's age.
This isn't an editing job and there isn't a style guide as of yet, just a style that we've grown accustomed to over the years. Permission isn't required to change a post title and it's never changed to alter the subject of the post, just formatting or clarification where appropriate.
On the right hand side you have a topic log and you see who did which changes when (to tags, the title, etc.). As to why, that's only something the editor can explain, I guess.
Aye, I saw that within mere seconds of my posting, I've seen it a few times before. Someone almost always seems to come around, edit the title according to some unspoken assumption of style, and move along without saying anything. If there's an actual style requirement guide on here I'd love to see it and better understand for myself what and why. Otherwise, having someone randomly edit my stuff without explanation seems weird.
Someone seems to be a fan of Chicago style and not the Associated Press rules.
A post of me just got moved from ~News to ~movies while they applied the .geopolitics tag. I don't sweat it too much but it seems kind of funny.
Tildes is a heavily moderated site and in most cases it's for the better. Sometimes there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it though.
Edit:
I guess consistency might be the explanation, since it's most important
As it happens I actually expect my topics to get moved if there's a more appropriate location, and likewise expect it to get tagged by people who know the tagging system better. That makes sense, and in fact it takes a weight of nervous uncertainty off my shoulders when posting.
The title editing threw me off. I didn't even immediately see the difference, and thus was further confused. I actually looked for a style guide before ever making my first new post on Tildes, and didn't find one, thus the change was unexpected.
They at least seem to be consistent with the numbers.
Here's a recent post that likely got edited as well, since the article itself has 20 in the title.
https://tildes.net/~health/17ic/us_maternal_deaths_more_than_doubled_over_twenty_years#comments
I agree that it would be much better to give some guidelines we can refer to, and that will make the work of mods easier and consistent at the same time.
Who specifically are you referring to, here?
The mods/admins or trusted users of tildes that change titles, remove or move posts and comments, and do all the moderator stuff.
Correct.
Or it's just editing 20 to twenty to fit the informally chosen style and nothing more.
Mountains:molehills
I see no mountains here, just clear explanations of why (edit: and thank you and everyone else for explaining), and resulting discussions of improvement.
I'm Lawful Good, a voluntarily habitual rules-follower in most of my life, at least insofar as it supports the common good. Having my stuff edited gives the impression that I've broken rules. I don't want to break rules, and unwritten rules make that difficult. A style guide would definitely be in support of the common good.
Not saying we couldn't use a style guide. Just stating that it's not an abuse of power (or feels like one) any more than any housekeeping task does. That is the mountain/molehill of which I speak. Your comment starting with an accusatory "without my permission" didn't help much either.
And that rule is followed here. The content wasn't changed.
Just housekeeping, see "Betrayal" for more info: https://tild.es/169n
Feel free to turn the pedantic microscope on yourself since it was your use of the word I referenced.
Except the title wasn't a typo, it's a style, it wasn't a comment, and the content/meaning wasn't changed.
Then you have a fundamental problem with how the site works or a fundamental misunderstanding of "content/meaning". Housekeeping will continue, it's already been stated that a formal style guide is needed but it takes only looking around for context clues to gather the basis of the informal one we have, and editing a title from 20 to twenty isn't akin to editing a comment (be it for a typo or not), nor any violation of some perceived golden rules about moderation elsewhere. The world and this site aren't perfectly structured, nor is any other place you may visit online, to expect such is to set ones self up for disappointment.
At this point the topic has been exhausted, the thread is offtopic, and the arguments are circular. Facts have been stated, how things are done established, needs to remedy perceived grievances are known and plans to address them have been created. I will no longer reply.
I agree with and understand all of the above, thanks. I'd love to see a style guide here. I'd love to be able to - on my own! - make a post that old-timers feel is "sufficiently compliant" for them to not have to edit my titles. My own feelings are just those of curiosity, but without an official guide that people can see, it's kind of a wild guess, and it's the kind of thing that I can certainly see others having a stronger reaction to.
I agree, it produced this large chain of off topic comments after all.
I think reddit has conditioned people to think that they have ownership of the things that they share, but I think that is a good thing to try to let go of. Tildes has a bunch of what might be termed "moderators" on other sites, but I think it's better to think of them as "tenders" or "librarians". I think it's also better to update thinking from "this is my post" to "a post shared with everyone". If someone adds tags, or updates the title, or does anything, it's not a value judgment about what you have shared, or how you have shared it; there's just maybe a different way that the group has been approaching it.
I had my only post's title changed, too, plus tags changed and added - silently and almost immediately. It was fine, but it felt weird and I kinda didn't like it.
And now having read the responses in this part of the thread, plus seen that some comments are deleted, there's been a reference to mods, and one person is now deciding the matter finished and won't respond further... I'm just... surprised, I guess is the right word. It's a more heavy-handed and rigid system than I'm used to.
Anyway, just wanted to give you some support with a "me too".
To be clear, those comments in the thread with @AugustusFerdinand were deleted by the person that posted them, not a mod (afaik, only Deimos can delete other users' comments/topics).
Their name seemed familiar and I think I've seen them delete their comments before.
Checking their profile, there are no comments/posts which supports that.
I don't know their reason for deleting all of their comments and I'm not trying to call them out about it, but I just wanted to point out it wasn't mods trying to censor differing opinions.
It was ten comments deep into a thread of an offtopic argument that didn't seem like it was going to be resolved by anything other than "let's agree to disagree".
I think taking a step back and deciding to remove yourself from things rather than continuing on and getting more angry with each comment is a good choice.
Which people are you referring to here?
If a user deletes their own comment it'll say Comment deleted by author whereas if it was moderated it'll say Comment deleted by site admin. There is only one person who can delete the posts or comments of others, but a dozen or more of us can edit tags, move between groups, edit titles, etc.
What I meant was, when you are referring to "mods" in your sentence, which specific people do you mean? Who are "the mods"?
I always assumed the person who left the comment deleted their own comment after the pile-on. But I see that as also disappointing, imagining how that felt for them.
I dunno if I'd call anyone here a mod other than @deimos, really. They're the only one who can delete content or ban people. Some of us have requested some extra abilities. There's about a dozen of us. I can edit tags, move posts between groups, edit titles, edit links. More like janitors or caretakers or something along those lines.
PS: I'm not actually the person you're replying to, just chiming in.
While not truly mods, a few trusted users have the ability to edit tags, post titles, and move posts between groups. However, Deimos is the only one who can delete other users posts/comments.
Yeah shit like this makes me lean more towards lemmy. Just waiting until apps support for it gets better...
Edit: I take it back! After being given some more insight on the reasoning, I'm bought in to the practice! I'm here to stay for the discourse! (But I'll get my shitpostmemes from lemmy :P) for anyone curious this comment made things clear for me https://tildes.net/~tildes/17m1/im_from_the_reddit_exodus_im_really_liking_it_here_what_should_i_know#comment-99gv
I enjoy the conversational atmosphere of Tildes and have no interest in Lemmy. I just want to know what inspires and supports this kind of willy-nilly, drive-by random-user editing without any explanation.
In case this doesn't get noticed officially, you can comment here... https://tildes.net/~tildes/15my/new_users_ask_your_questions_about_tildes_here
Or you can create your own talk post. I think you make a good point and that the criteria for the stealth edits should be more transparent
Ah thanks! I didn't even see that. Is that one of those rotating auto-generated reposts, or an all-encompassing reference to return to over time?
My guess as someone who has only been here three weeks myself is that it was created for convenience to deal with the influx right now. It got pushed off the front page and it might be time to request a new thread. I'm trying not to be too demanding as I like most of what I see and the site is run by volunteers. But reasonable requests should be made imho to benefit us all.
As far as getting pushed off the front page goes if it gets more comments or votes then it'll pop straight back up.
Tildes vs Lemmy/Kbin or Squabbles reminds me of the disagreement between the Ents and the Entwives. Some people prefer gardens. Some people prefer the wilderness. Some like both. I am grateful that Deimos created this nifty site for me to play in.
http://www.tolkien.cro.net/talesong/ents.html
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/wiki/philosophy/index
I like that analogy. It also in some ways makes me think of Skub/Anti-Skub, or the "Green & Purple Drazi" from Babylon 5.