I have around 10k emails (Gmail) that I would like to dump into text files.

June 26, 2008 11:40 PM

I have around 10k emails (Gmail) that I would like to dump into text files. They are bunched into conversations of length 100 emails a piece. Has anyone written a script I can use? Some caveats inside.

Caveats:

1. I have intermittent computer access, so a solution that does not involve hours of coding-tweaking.

2. The conversations are a mix of text and attachments.

3. One of the conversations is a monstrous 500 emails long and takes forever to load.

Thank you muchly,
+TP

posted by Taksi Putra to computers & internet (4 comments total)

You can connect to Gmail with any IMAP client and copy the messages to your own computer. Conveniently, All Mail is a single folder for this purpose. This will get all your messages individually, not threaded as conversations. Does this help?
posted by grouse at 12:55 AM on June 27, 2008

Does this help?
posted by grouse at 4:55 PM on June 27

Hmm, kinda.

I do not have root access / any kind of a programming environment right now.

I have these messages under a common label.

What I need is a script or utility that will read the emails in, strip all header/footer info and dump the text into files.

I figure I can get root for a little while to install an app; but I was hoping for a Firefox plugin or widget of some sort to do this for me.
posted by Taksi Putra at 1:11 AM on June 27, 2008

You can use something like Python without root access.
This is what I recently used to pull a load of emails out of an IMAP server & it worked great. Wish I had access to the code I used, but it's at work & I'm at home.
posted by seanyboy at 4:03 AM on June 27, 2008

Gmail displays labels as folders when you are using an IMAP client so you should be able to use that sort out the messages you want. Something like Thunderbird will store these in mbox format, which is a straight text file so you would be half way there at least. They should be threaded as well, though gmail's notion of a conversation doesn't always seem to follow standard notions of threading.
posted by tallus at 4:48 AM on June 27, 2008