got-your-back

Not sure if I'm missing something when I look at the discussion here, but there's Got Your Back [0], which backs up all emails in a Gmail account as .eml files. This seems to be the easiest and most straightforward way for me. [0] https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back

https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back - Open source - Resume (so backups/restores will eventually complete) Honorable mention: https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/ - Not open source - GUI with index: nice for searching mail locally - Resume only for backup (so large restores generally fail)

I have not tried Gmvault, but I have tried two other backup solutions. I recommend [GYB]: - I have successfully migrated a 10+ GB gmail account to another account. - There were a few emails that could not be restored, but I think this is a limitation of the Gmail API: it does not allow an email to be restored if it thinks it contains malicious content. - There was also a large swath of emails that were restored with the wrong date (date of restoration instead of actual email date.) This was a little annoying and hopefully can be fixed later. - Downsides: complicated installation and no simple way to view/search through emails. [MailStore] is good for archiving emails (but not restoring them): - Lacks one crucial feature: resume restore. A 10GB+ restore never works to completion on the first try, and mailstore must start over every time. S

I use https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back for gmail

This is why I export my emails to my laptop on a regular basis with GYB (https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back) even though I am a paying Google for Business customer. The real controversy here however is the dependency on a US phone number for securely transacting in so many ways. Carriers barely can hold onto a number for you with SIM swaps and there is no such concept as "owning" a phone number

It's not a solution to all of Takeout's problems, but if you just care about backing up email within a Google Workspace, check out Got Your Back: https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back It is, I believe, written by a Google employee. It's a really great CLI tool that allows you to dump mailboxes to disk as a bunch of text files. You can also restore them to another account. Lots of flexibility as well. I gave up on Takeout and Google's own Data Migration tool, both of which I found just too flaky and inconsistent - my experience was not dissimilar to that in the OP.

MailStore Home[1] is a free email archiving program. - It has indexed (read: fast) search + basic reader/browser. - Portable version so you can just copy to USB and share with anyone. - Successfully downloaded 10+ GB of Gmail. (190,000+ emails.) - The one caveat is the restore/upload isn't very good. It is very slow, and I never got it to succeed. (No resume; must start all over on error.) So for email backup/transfer, I switched to GYB (which can resume and successfully restored/transferred nearly all of the emails): https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back [1]: https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/

I did a bunch of research on this earlier this year. I really do enjoy Gmail, even if it is technically a cloud service. So, I split the difference on this one. I use a Gmail account as "primary", but I still have my own domain for email inboxes. The best option I found is to have my own domain (e.g. at Hover) and then have the MX servers managed by Cloudflare's new product, email routing. They also handle SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. That's described here[1] and here[2]. What's nice about this setup: you have your own domain; you can setup custom forwarding rules; all email flows to a single GMail inbox. You can also still send email "from" those domains if you use the Gmail SMTP server[3]. So then your only concern is backup and email message export. For this, I setup automation with a script called got-your-back (gyb)[4]; it's a nice Python s

Notice that Google Takeout is broken with regards to non-UTF8 email encodings (for some of you who archive old emails). I noticed it when coding a small tool https://github.com/karteum/gmvaultdb to (among other things) import the mbox from Takeout into an sqlite DB : Google performs some encoding conversions that permanently break all non-ascii characters in non-UTF8 emails (they are all replaced by 0xEFBFBD). In order to archive old emails, I had to use mbsync with IMAP (gmvault does not work anymore with Python 3, and I didn't try yet https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back ).

This is better for Gmail backups. https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back

Email is actually one of the easier things to transfer. This [1] project lets you download emails, including stars, labels, drafts, sent, etc. You can then re-upload them to another Gmail account with minimal loss of state. You can also import into other email services, although that route has more rough edges. [1]: https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back

There's also a fantastic tool by Jay Lee that will do it in an automated fashion https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back

I suggest using https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back for gmail. It works better because it can copy rules, labels, stars, etc.

Fire up gyb [0] now, and by the time this (or whatever solution you want) is ready for an import, you'll be done. 0. https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back

https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back Got Your Back (GYB) is a command line tool for backing up your Gmail messages to your computer using Gmail's API over HTTPS.