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

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.