Saving Email to Text Document

August 23, 2015 8:50 PM

I want to save all emails with a certain label in my gmail account to one big text document. How would you do that? I'm on a Mac (I assume I will need to use an email client app to do this).
posted by Quisp Lover to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Try one of these 'if this then that' recipes, or make your own - you could probably easily tell it to save to a text file on dropbox, or evernote, or similar.
posted by destructive cactus at 9:20 PM on August 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: In Apple Mail, labels become folders. File > Save As... gives you a plain text option if you select all the messages in the folder. Note that you'll get the entire thread with each message.

If it's more than a few hundred, or if you want to see if you can get rid of headers, etc, I would do Google Takeout, select just that label, and do a mbox > txt conversion.
posted by supercres at 10:16 PM on August 23, 2015

Why in Text document?
Preserve formatting in searchable pdf files. The text is OCR'd so you can still search the entire archive as if its a text document.
Check out Email Archiver
posted by Mac-Expert at 11:23 PM on August 23, 2015

Response by poster: "Why in Text document?"

I intend to use GREP to boil down certain data in these hundreds of emails into a usable form.
posted by Quisp Lover at 8:20 AM on August 24, 2015

Response by poster: Thanks, supercres.

I'm not using Apple Mail (though certainly could have loaded it for this purpose), but Google Takeout worked perfectly, and I just opened the mbox file with BBedit and grepped away.
posted by Quisp Lover at 9:44 AM on August 24, 2015