I have every gmail email I have ever gotten plus attachments downloaded to my Thunderbird client, it is incorrect to say that Google does not let you access that data. They let you do a full sync and use whatever client you want.

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gxs 5 days ago | parent [-]

I never said they don’t allow it, they even have something called google takeout actually that makes it a bit easier

Yes, one way of doing this is to turn on an email client and let it run on your computer for hours and hours to download everything

The problem is that unless you’ve done that incrementally since the beginning, going back and doing it now is unreliable. The take process above is your best bet and probably the best you can actually do, but outside of that there’s nothing that works well

I’ve even written gscripts with different approaches to do it and it always ends up petering out no matter how careful I am

Also, I think some attachments are permanently corrupted because my apps, whatever the app, always hangs when I try to download them

Anyway, this could be made a lot easier if they actually wanted to let people do that

If anything, it’d be great if they had a tool to do it to begin with - I’ve had my account for over 20 years now so just downloading everything is no small feat

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dangus 5 days ago | parent [-]

I set up new computers somewhat frequently and have never had any issues downloading the entire 20 year old email-never-deleted mailbox from the server, including attachments.

I will also point out that free email is not something that should be expected to be a scalable storage service.

	▲	gxs 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That’s interesting, maybe I’m doing something wrong That said, the times I’ve encountered this, when the import doesn’t actually fail and appears successful, I still can’t access the specific attachment I’m looking for It could be an old picture that is probably gone for good but forever shows loading… in the ui