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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

We do have those formats. Mbox for mail, iCalendar for calendars, vCard for contacts. They're all IETF standards.

Google provide data export from nearly all of their services in standard formats. Where no established open standard exists, they provide clean HTML or JSON.

https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

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I wouldn't actually call Mbox a standard. Thunderbird supports it, but I'd argue it sucks as a way to escape Gmail, because no competitor to Gmail supports it as an import method. In fact, even Gmail itself can't import from Mbox. It may be a standard in that it's defined somewhere officially, but it's not really a standard in the definition that it's commonly used.

As someone who has nearly completed their GExit, I'd say I found Takeout to be borderline useless as an export strategy.

On the one hand, there are many mbox variations and you may encounter some difficulty in getting your emails out of the Takeout mbox file.

On the other hand, please understand that there is no better option. Said differently: Google Takeout has made the BEST choice here. I giggled with delight when I saw they chose mbox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox

    [...] 1975 [...]

Couldn’t you import the Mbox archive in Thunderbird/Claws-Mail/something and then copy the mails to whatever cloud provider you wish to use?

And it's pretty easy. I have a few accounts on Thunderbird and I can drag and drop e-mail directly from one account to another, I think they are .eml files. You can also have local accounts just for storage.

There are several tools available to convert from Mbox to proprietary mailbox formats.

Is there any good way to automate this monthly

There are several commercial solutions for G Suite backups including SpinBackup and Backupify.

https://spinbackup.com/products/google-apps-backup/ http://www.datto.com/backupify/google-apps-backup

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