my gmail account is full, most of the space is emails. I tried to download them through “takeout” and it has an option that says hey let’s split this up into 2GB chunks. And you select that and it sends you one 12GB .mbox file regardless. The 12GB download keeps failing and now it says you’ve already downloaded these files too many times. Like gimme a break. Anyone have any experience with this? Any ways to get around the download failing or to force it to send you smaller chunks? Suchhhh a pain.

I hope to move to a different mail thing at some boint. I know y’all are gonna tell me don’t use gmail dont use gmail lol.

Thanks!

  • 0xtero@kbin.social
    18·
    11 months ago

    Local mail client (Thunderbid) -> IMAP/POP -> sync.
    Once done, move to a local folder and delete from Gmail.
    You can just backup the Thunderbird profile, if you want to keep the mails safe

    • toothpicks@beehaw.orgOP
      4·
      11 months ago

      Thanks, I’ve set up Thunderbird using POP. Does it just download everything automatically when you first login? Thank yiu!

      • TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee
        2·
        11 months ago

        Look into the differences between POP and iMap. One saves a local copy of everything(pop), the other just checks in with a given mail server(imap) and caches a desired amount of emails.

        There’s some other key differences but for what you’re wanting to do I’d recommend POP

      • Radiant_sir_radiant@beehaw.org
        2·
        11 months ago

        You’ll want to use IMAP, not POP3. While the former can see and manage folders, move items between them, add and remove stuff at will etc., the latter can just download and optionally delete messages from the inbox.

        In short: IMAP lets you manage all of your stuff, POP3 can only make a local copy of the inbox.

  • e0qdk@kbin.social
    9·
    11 months ago

    Any ways to get around the download failing

    I did this incredibly stupid procedure with Firefox yesterday as a workaround for a failing Google Takeout download:

    • backup the .part file from the failed download
    • restart the download (careful – if you didn’t move/back it up, it will be deleted and you will have to download the whole thing again; found this out the hard way on a 50GB+ file… that failed again)
    • immediately pause the new download after it starts writing to disk
    • replace the new .part file with the old .part file from earlier (or – see [1] below)
    • Firefox might not show progress for a long time, but will eventually continue the download (I saw it reading the file back from disk with iotop so I just let it run)
    • sanity check that you actually got the whole thing and that it is usable (in my case, I knew a hash for the file)

    [1] You can actually replace the new .part file with anything that has the same size in bytes as the old file – I replaced it with a file full of zeros and manually merged the end onto the original .part file with a tiny custom python script since I had already moved the incomplete file to other media before realizing I could try this. (In my case, the incomplete file would still have been useful even with the last ~1MB cut off.)

    There are probably better options in most cases – like Thunderbird for mailbox as other people suggested, or rclone for getting stuff from Drive – but if you need to get Takeout to work and the download keeps failing this may be another option to try.

    • toothpicks@beehaw.orgOP
      4·
      11 months ago

      THANK YOU! This seems to have worked. Now I just have to figure out how what to do with the .mbox file.

  • peereboominc@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    In addition what others have already said, in the Gmail search bar it can search for mails that have an attachment larger than x mb. I did that some time ago and there where a lot large mails that were not worth it to save on disk

  • toothpicks@beehaw.orgOP
    1·
    11 months ago

    Do yous think I need to have any concerns about the compatibility of the .mbox file in future years or can I just leave it like that?

    • Radiant_sir_radiant@beehaw.org
      1·
      11 months ago

      If it’s a Unix mbox file you’ll probably be fine - that format hasn’t changed in decades and is just as unlikely to change in the foreeeable future. There may be an additional step involved if you want to import it to, say, Thunderbird 2032.

  • shrugal@lemm.ee
    1·
    11 months ago

    When I downloaded my Google Photos content I just grabbed the links and added them to JDownloader, which can usually resume partial downloads. There are also download manager extensions for most browsers, maybe give one of those a try.