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The website should also encourage users to download a copy of their online accounts (Google Takeout, Facebook data, etc). That's a pretty big omission in 2024. I know plenty of people who have been locked out of their own accounts for one reason or another.

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Nice one - you reminded me to restart my Thunderbird backup of GMail. I've got it setup to use imap to connect to GMail (a couple of different accounts as it happens) so it's got a copy of all my emails and keeps itself up to date efficiently. As a bonus, it's far more capable at deleting old messages if I need to clear some space to keep under Google's limit.

Try running 'getmail' with a daily cron job. It's an old piece of software, and (at least for me) required an initial `for` loop to catch up with old mail, but it's the best low-maintenance way to backup Gmail AFAIK. Deleting old mail is another story though.

That's probably a pretty massive download for most people, but I guess well worth it.

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