How to Download All Emails from Gmail (in bulk)

hey everyone this is tony teaches tech i'm tony and in this video i'm going to show you how to download your entire gmail inbox that includes all of the emails that you sent you received plus all the attachments so if that's something you want to learn how to do let's go ahead and hop on into the tutorial here and this is my personal email inbox for gmail uh we're gonna download everything in here i don't know how many uh there it is 23 849 messages we're going to download every single one of them and the way we're going to do that is with something called google takeout so if you go to takeout.google.com in your web browser this is a google service and pretty much for every other google service that you have ever used you have the option a similar option to download the data from it so for example you can download your google contacts your google drive uh what else if you use google photos you can download google photos but what we're interested in is downloading our mail our gmail which is right here messages and attachments in your gmail inbox or your gmail account in the form of an mbox file okay so that's that's how we're going to download that but as you can see we have all of these check boxes selected for all of these services we only want to do mail so let's deselect everything come back down to mail which is in the m section there it is mail and then we'll just select that box okay so multiple formats what does that say so it says email messages will be downloaded in mbox format which is a standard format for storing mail messages perfect and then user settings are going to be downloaded as a json file that's just like all the metadata associated with it okay and then by default excuse me all mail is selected all all your folders all of your um all these categories that you've set up potentially that's going to be downloaded by default but for this demonstration i'm not going to do that i'm just going to do a subset of all of this because that's a lot of stuff so i'm going to download just my inbox okay just the emails that i received i could also download the sent ones as well but just for brevity i'm going to download just my inbox okay other point if you want to download them all hit select all or click on include all messages in mail okay so i'm going to click on ok and all the way down here at the bottom we can click on next step and this is where you can pick if you have a very very large inbox let's say you can expand this to a size that's larger than two gigabytes but basically all right let me let me explain this if you have an inbox that is let's say uh 20 gigabytes in size but you struggle to download an archive that's of that size then i would recommend maybe keeping the default two gigabyte archive size and then you would get 10 2 gigabyte archives that you would individually download those 10 archives and then combine those extract those into a single mbox file so this is google's way of pretty much helping people who if you ever try to download a big file with a slow internet connection it probably times out or the internet goes out and then you're like 90 of the way there and then you have to start back over so by downloading smaller files for bigger archives then you will be able to do that over a better uh a worse internet connection i should say if it times out then you only have to repeat 2 gigabytes as opposed to 20 gigabytes hope that makes sense otherwise uh i'm just going to stick with the default here two gigabytes are going to be downloaded as zip files and we're just going to export that once so let's go ahead and create that export and this will take a little bit of time for you know 24 000 messages we'll see how long it takes but google will email you when it's ready to download so we'll just go ahead and fast forward through that and i'll catch up with you when that happens okay guys a little bit over 30 minutes later i got the email from google saying that my data is ready to be downloaded so here is that email on my screen and they broke it up into two different zip files so we can click on we can either click on download one of two or two of two i'm going to go to the manage exports page which is you're going to go there either way and i'm not sure why this is the case but for some reason although you know what we picked in the previous screen they decided to split it up into a 4.87 gigabyte file and then the second archive is going to be less than one megabyte so i'm a little confused why that's the case but we're gonna do is download each of these individual archives um and this will take i i would expect um let's see it says 13 maybe 15 minutes so i'll have to fast forward through this as well and again i'll catch up with you when that finishes okay guys so those files have been downloaded as you can see here and we have our mbox file which contains all of our email messages and then the archive file so let's make this screen about half screen and then we'll drag those onto the desktop and at least on mac while this looks like it is a folder that you can open if you try to do that it's going to say you need a special type of application to open that and that's where we're going to download and install thunderbird i've actually already done that but if you need to get it yourself you can go to thunderbird.net and download that should work for mac windows and linux so once you have that installed on your computer i'm going to open it go to thunderbird open that application and uh we're going to basically take this file the mbox file and import it into thunderbird so we can look at our messages so how do we do that well what we need to do is add a extension so go to tools and add-ons and then we're going to search for something called import export tools hit enter and we want the the one called import expert tools ng so let's add that to thunderbird and we'll add okay and add i'm not sure why that keeps asking me but looks like we have that in there so we can access that by going to tools import export ng and then we want to do is import an inbox files but let's get out of here first just so we know what we're working with make sure you have your uh destination folder selected um or at least the inbox i'm not sure which one let me see if this works go to tools yeah so make sure you have that selected and then go to import mbox file and then you can you have a bunch of options here we're going to go with the default import directly one or more mbox files so click on ok and this is going to allow you to choose that location on your desktop so let's go to the desktop click on inbox zero zero one dot mbox open and this is the part that uh depending on how big your inbox file is m box file is it could take a while so we're gonna just skip pass through this okay guys all those emails have been imported into my local inbox here and as you can see there's 32 671 messages not the 24 000 that gmail actually reported and if we look at this i mean you could see here this is one of the most recent emails that i've received excuse me this is what the content of that looks like here and then if we make this half screen again and pull up the actual email inbox we'll see that this is what the original email looked like so there's there's a difference here because thunderbird has blocked remote content in this message now if we want to see all of that stuff we can say allow remote content from all three origins listed above or for the whole email address itself so that'll look a little bit more like what we'd expect it to look like so again locally here on gmail here same thing for all these other emails you can go through here here's one with an attachment so you have pretty much a one-to-one relationship between your gmail inbox and all the individual emails over here in thunderbird or whatever client you do choose to work with i want to thank you guys for watching this video check out some more google takeout videos over here subscribe to this channel for more videos like this from me in the future and if you do i will see you in the next one you

Channel: Tony Teaches Tech

Views: 96,660

Keywords: download gmail emails, how to download emails from gmail, download all emails from gmail, how to download all emails from gmail, download gmail emails in bulk, download gmail emails to computer, google mail download all mail

Id: x26B1_eHP3o

Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021