Copying emails out of an account without pop3 or IMAP access?

April 10, 2017 9:51 AM

I work for a medium sized company where I am moving from an internal contractor position to independent contractor (good for both of us, actually). One consequence is that I am losing my internal accounts, including email.

The company uses gmail, and internal IT policy is that pop3 and IMAP are disabled. Before this kicks in I'm hoping to copy out all my emails into the email account (my own"business gmail" account) I plan to use going forward.

I've spent a few hours on google and come up with nothing that doesn't involve pop3 or IMAP. Any ideas? Some gmail specific script that can go scrape it all out maybe?

posted by MillMan to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

If you have such an internal policy, you may want to make sure it is OK to actually pull your emails.
posted by rockindata at 10:05 AM on April 10, 2017

You can loop through your messages and forward them with Google Apps Script. Here's code reference. You can only send 1500 messages a day through Apps Script so this may be tedious. You also have to forward individual messages instead of entire threads. You can write the script as a standalone script in Google Drive or in a Google Spreadsheet.

Also, if your ongoing access to this email will help you in your role with the company, I would ask if they can make an exception to the policy.
posted by beyond_pink at 10:05 AM on April 10, 2017

Yeah you need to talk to your IT team - they will notice 1500 forwards a day from your account. Either they will be able to give you a solution, or they will tell you it's not allowed.
posted by brainmouse at 10:10 AM on April 10, 2017

I have no idea whether it's possible to reimport them, but this sounds like a job for Google Takeout, if it's enabled by your company for Mail. A cursory search suggests that it might be possible, and either way, it'll at least be searchable and well-structured.
posted by supercres at 10:38 AM on April 10, 2017

Asking I.T. for a takeout seems to be the easiest-- but most desktop email apps that support the gmail protocol will enable you to download your full mailbox (which means it's not using pop3 nor imap).

For instance, you could use Mail (OSX) to download all the emails, then export the mailbox from Mail to retain a copy/convert it into something you can then drag back over into a new email account.
posted by Static Vagabond at 1:06 PM on April 10, 2017

From a purely legal CYA standpoint you should ask IT (probably in conjunction with your manager) how best to handle this, especially if they've disabled POP3 and IMAP, since they likely did so out of a concern about managing data they own. Since it's likely that not having access to historical emails would make you less productive, it's in their interest to figure this out as well. Otherwise you could potentially expose yourself to a misappropriation of trade secrets lawsuit if you migrated your email and things ever went south.
posted by Aleyn at 3:08 PM on April 10, 2017

Here is what I would try...

1. Set up a virtual machine with virtualbox and install an OS that can run chrome.
2. Run chrome on your new virtual machine and install gmail offline access
3. Log into your account and sync
4. Disable networking on the virtual machine

I have not attempted this but in theory you should be able to access your emails even after loosing access.
posted by talkingmuffin at 3:20 PM on April 10, 2017

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. After a number of no-gos with different tools I am in the middle of downloading everything locally into Outlook using "google apps sync for outlook." I'll figure out how to move it to the other account later, or maybe just leave everything locally in outlook.

As far as legal concerns, it's not really a company or role where this will result in problems - if I had actual trade secrets or patents to my name, then it might. On the off chance someone asks a quick conversation should suffice.
posted by MillMan at 7:43 PM on April 10, 2017