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Comment by manaskarekar | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have a comprehensive/good solution to how to move all your stuff out of Gmail?

Midway while typing this post, I did a search and boom: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3581613

If you prefer command line, there is a script called imapsync. It looks like now it's sold for money, but there are older versions around back from the time when it was opensourced.

I used it to move mail to gmail quite a while ago since I was tired of having mail, calendar and contacts in different places.

Does anyone have a comprehensive/good solution to how to move all your stuff out of Gmail?

I use Thunderbird + IMAP to sync a local copy of my Gmail email every week or two.

It does not sync anything except your email, but even that much is pretty nice, for peace of mind.

I don't use email clients, so pardon me if this is elementary, but is there a good way to compress and archive downloaded emails with their attachments?

Also, is the formatting (rtf) preserved?

I don't know the answer to your first question, but in response to your second question, yes, formatting is preserved.

To answer your first question: It's certainly possible from a technical level, but I'm not aware of any end-user application that enables this functionality out-of-the-box.

One hacky-but-straightforward way to do this would be to take advantage of an email<->filesystem translation like NMH or MBox, and then write some script that would automatically purge the attachments before archiving.

You'd still have to download the attachments, I believe; I could be wrong, but I don't think IMAP will let you get around that easily.

(To be fair, Gmail's implementation doesn't adhere to IMAP very well in my experience - labels/folders/tags are a major problem - so YMMV).

If you're a technical sort, offlineimap is quite a good tool, although I don't think it compresses downloaded emails.

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