Having access to your data and being able to take it with you is important, especially if that data contains precious memories like old love letters, your first job offer, or that 100-message thread discussing the merits of various cat videos. Starting today we’re rolling out the ability to export a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data, making it easy to back up your data or move to another service.
You can download all of your mail and calendars or choose a subset of labels and calendars. You can also download a single archive file for multiple products with a copy of your Gmail, Calendar, Google+, YouTube, Drive, and other Google data.
Great move by Google. The Data Liberation Front had gotten a bit stale, and it was about time exporting all your emails from Gmail became easier. Good backup tool, too – for, you know, company stuff. Or emails from a girl you like.
It’s not that Google doesn’t do evil. it’s that they do enough good that (when I compare them to other tech companies) they don’t seem all bad. Things like this make it easier for me to stick with gmail. Totally using duck duck go though.
A few years ago I would have agreed with you. But Google has become so much like a Facebook/Microsoft hybrid that I am constantly on the lookout for something better.
– closing google reader
– closing igoogle
– breaking youtube subscriptions
– breaking youtube comments
– stop supporting Galaxy Nexus (600 euro!)
– moving away from open standards
– playstore
On top of that. Where is the innovation? A few years back we got Maps, Gmail, Reader, iGoogle, Youtube etc.
I can’t dispute your complaints about killing off products, but they are still innovative.
New innovations at Google:
-Play Newstand
-Google Now
-Google Plus
-Google Glass
-Google Dart
-Self Driving Cars
-Chrome Pixel
In addition to all of the updates with their existing products. Ie, Google Maps is much better now than it was when released, ditto for all others ( including Youtube IMHO, but I’ve always despised the comments and never used subscriptions. )
Did you people forget that Youtube was bought by Google? ;P
Well, actually in case of Gmail it was kinda already possible and relatively easy – cronjob and getmail 😉
Thunderbird with the proper IMAP settings worked fine too (and probably other e-mail clients too).
great option for export. should have been available from the start. wish I could also *really* erase data from google servers, also nsa servers. too bad…
there is a great alternative-lister site by the way (advertisement/disclaimer) called https://prism-break.org/
some alternatives are just easy to use out of the box. some are true DIY fashion alternatives.
Serious question: What do you mean by “really erase” email from Google servers? Is there evidence that email remains on Google servers after it’s deleted?
Edited 2013-12-06 15:32 UTC
Considering US law as it stands, you’d be a fool to believe it doesn’t remain on Google’s servers for at least eighteen months after deletion.
[quote] and it was about time exporting all your emails from Gmail became easier. Good backup tool, too – for, you know, company stuff. Or emails from a girl you like. [/quote]
despite being a usual critic of Google regarding privacy for a couple of years now, i must say don’t understand the excitement about this. It was always possible, I really don’t understand your comment.
I took away all of my email with me when i stopped using Gmail. Just set up thunderbird, Mail.App outlook or whatever other IMAP/POP client you use, connect to your gmail account and download everything (usually takes a large couple of hours). Afterwards either store them on your program on your pc, export to Mbox files, or just move the messages to the folders of another IMAP account, already setuped on your program, and it will just upload everything to your other server. done, easy.
as an other commenter said, the only thing that would be really important is making sure that all of our data was really erased from google’s servers and DB. Also, that they wouldn’t inspect and store the mail when one has ‘asked’ to “forward and delete” everything.
Making sure Google really has permanently and irretrievably deleted your data?
And exactly how do you propose doing that? Ask politely and take their word for it?
It’s good to have a dream I suppose. (kidding!)
Edited 2013-12-06 20:17 UTC
Thank you for making this easy, Google. This tells me enough people at Google are still somewhat sensible.
As others have said, until all Internet traffic is truly encrypted end-to-end, we should all be more mindful of what we place on the internet.
Nonetheless, good move by google. Yes, you could do most of this on your own, but making it really easy to do for everyone counts.
… but in fact you could already do this. If you used gmail with IMAP & Thunderbird, you already had a local copy. Or you could sync to maildir. With Sunbird / Mozilal Calendar / another iCal client, you could sync / copy the Calendar.
Very nice though that it is now supported using an easy to use web interface. But for continuous backups, just syncing is better.
In my experience having a large mailbox and (especially) having many many “pseudo imap folders” in GMail means Thunderbrd becomes unable to fully sync with the server.
Even when it claims to be fully up-to-date I have often found it is not, and sometimes by a very wide margin…
That makes syncing TB as an archiving method utterly unreliable, even when dedicated addons.
I haven´t found a solution for this yet, hopefully it can be overcome now.
Meanwhile, OperaMail seems to behave very well with GMail and might be worth testing as an archiving tool…