Updated 24.1.14 Google has finally added the possibility of being able to download all the emails sent, received and stored in Gmail to your computer .
You can then download the entire Gmail archive in case you want to close the account, to keep the various messages or in the case of a migration, to transfer the mail perhaps to a computer program.
Google has added Gmail and the calendar among the data downloadable through Google Takeout, the service that allows you to locally save the cloud data of the various Google services.
To download the entire archive of Gmail and the calendar just go to the Google Takeout page by following this link dedicated to these two specific services.
The archive will be more or less large based on the use that has been made of Gmail, the number of messages and the amount of attachments sent and received.
In the configuration screen you can use the Edit button to choose which Gmail labels to include in the archive, if you do not want to include, for example, the deleted emails and those of the Spam folder that will certainly be useless.
At the end the service, after a few minutes or a few hours depending on the size, creates and sends the archive via email and can be downloaded to the computer.
The Zip file contains an MBOX type file which can be imported, if and when desired, into programs such as Thunderbird.
To import the MBOX file into Thunderbird and then reread all the downloaded emails, open the Windows folder (7 or 8) C: \ users \ Username \ AppData \ Roaming \ Thunderbird \ Profiles \ ######## .default \ Mail \ Local Folders \ folder and copy the extracted MBOX file into this folder.
Open Thunderbird and you will find all the GMAIL emails saved on your computer in a readable format, even movable to another mail account if you wish.
Finally, I remember that you can make an Email backup of Gmail with the excellent Mailstore program that I mentioned in another article.
