Can anyone give me some advise how to migrate or archive 15 years of Gmail emails so that I still can read theme?
I’ve created a new email adress on a webhost, the inbox has only 5 gb bug, so forwording all messages is not an option. All my Emails are aproximatly 15GB big.
Maybe I can download them on may nas?
I guess I’m not the only one that want to leave google but want to keep my email with me.
Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/ the unGoogled mobile OS and online services
Hey Andy,
thanks for the welcome and thanks for the reply.
I’m descovering this new “privacy” world thanks to this community. I read a lot of very intersting thing here. And I think I decided to do the “big” step to move away from google, apple and facebook. At least as much as I can.
I do have over 23000 mails and I would like to take them with me. I still don’t know the best way. Ten years a go I moved away from gmx. And now that I have my own NAS I actualy do not want to move my emails to an other host wich I don’t trust.
I will probably never read thos mails again but sometime I have to search for a specific email. Also I will not switch off this email account, I still want to get new email from it. I have so many account that are linked to this adresse. I would loss so many important things.
The first step is maybe to forward new mail to an adresse as you suggested if I understand it right.
Second step is to migrate alls 23k mail to place where I still can read them. Don’t know how and where yet.
@Snowest you can use the email account here at /e/ https://ecloud.global/login. The storage is limited, but you can sponsor and support /e/ to get more space. Do you really need 23k mails ever again?
Additional you can check this sites:
My opionion: I prefer local storage for the mails. Start from scratch with the new privacy focussed account.
Absolutly not, I do not need 23k mails ever again. And I know it would be a greate moment to clean all my mails. But I don’t like cleaning, so I rather take everything and if I nead somthin in my “old” mails, I will search for it. 
I do host my data on my own nas. So I don’t have ane account. Yes I have one, but I don’t use it. I have enough other email adresses.
But I do agree, I will support this community, this is worth it!!
If you live in the EU, you are under the GDPR, so you can request to Google in the settings of your account a complete copy of the data Google has. Maybe it will include mails, you can try.
By the way, you will probably be a little scared when you will see what Google has on you 
(I don’t know if this feature is also available for non-EU users).
There are several tools out there with which you can easily migrate/backup your IMAP mail accounts (e.g. ImapSize), this can even be done with Thunderbird itself (probably not very comfortable).
Also, the 5GB inbox size restriction is pretty common for webhosting mail accounts. But this usually only applies for the “inbox folder” and not for archives. Give it a double check - if it’s really only your inbox that has this restriction, you could still migrate all mails to an archive folder while storing them in the same account.
I know that cleaning out your mailbox is probably one of the least thrilling things to do and can also take ages, but I’d still definitely recommend you to do so. One basic principle in terms of privacy on the internet is raising, collecting and storing the least amount of data possible. So if those 23k mails you have in your inbox reach 15 years back in time, someone that gains access to all those mails could easily reconstruct your life (what did you buy on the internet, which sites where you registered to, who did you communicate with, etc.) for a pretty significant period of your life. And you can easily prevent this by following this basic privacy principle and dump old stuff where you know for sure that you will never ever need it again. I’m sure that it would give you a good feeling knowing that 15 years of your life are not stored accessible at all times in a data center anymore somewhere in the world where you don’t have any control about it. This maybe sounds a bit paranoid but as you are new to the privacy world, I thought that I’d give you some food for thought
@Anonyme very interesting, I will do that for sure!
@exyna
Thanks for your very helpful answer. I think you are absolutely right!
What do you exactly mean by cleaning my mailbox? Move my mail to a new mailbox and deleted them on gmail?
I though that gmail is never deleting my stuff. Who knows if my information are then gone?
I definitely will deleting my mail box after moving, this makes sence to me. But I doubt that my information are gone.
Can anyone tell me how to move emails from one mailbox to an other mailbox, in mail from eOS.
If I’m not mistaken it should work with IMAP. But I can’t move mails outside a mailbox.
With cleaning out your mailbox I mean that you should delete all your old and unneeded mails in Gmail instead of migrating them to a new account. Gmail offers some quiet useful search filters with which you can easily group mails to make the deletion process a lot easier.
Of course Google keeps backups at some point to increase data safety incase of server failures, etc. If you delete mails in Gmail, they are moved to the Trash folder at first. From within the Trash folder, you can then choose to “Delete Mail forever”. This will actually really delete mails from your inbox and won’t make them accessible anymore to you or anyone who may overtakes your account. After a period of up to 60 days, your mails will also be deleted from any Google backup storage.
Keep in mind that this probably does not apply to any metadata Google already collected about your incoming mails (like which products you bought, etc.). If you finished migrating, you could however submit a deletion request according to the GDPR which will make sure that your account along with all connected data is deleted.
Are you trying to do that from your mobile phone? I’d recommend you to do that on your computer with a client like Thunderbird. You are right that this is possible with IMAP but I think the mobile app just does not support moving between different mail accounts.
Okay, thanks for your answer.
And yes you are right, I will do thant an my desktop. And maybe install Thunderbird specially for this big migration.
Thanks for the help
@Snowest, it has already been said, but I feel it could be helpful if I spell it out for you. As an example. If you install Thunderbird on you laptop or PC, and link it to your gmail with imap, after some time (a day or so), you will have the 15 GB on your laptop/PC locally. 15GB is not much for present day laptops/PC’s. Then, you open an extra archive account/folder in Thunderbird on your local machine, select all your 23000 emails, and cut and paste to your new archive folder. After some time (…), your Thunderbird imap copy of gmail will be empty, and your online account with Google gmail will be empty too. voila! With thunderbird you can search your 23000 mails in archive anytime you want. To emtpy the memory of Google, see the advice above. Please setup a backup procedure for your local copy to your NAS! HTH
If using Windows, you can give this good tool a try : https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/
That is briliant!!
I even did a network folder and linked thunderbird to it. As soon as TB syncted every singel mail, I will move them to my NAS! Probably, I will never ever read them again :-), but at least I do have them with me.
Thanks for this genius Idea, just what I need! Cool
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