Searching Gmail records
September 9, 2013 9:13 AM   Subscribe

How can I download to my local disk all gmails from a certain person or persons, or containing a keyword?

When I type their name into the search field, I seem to only get recent emails. I want to type a list of senders, and a keyword or two, and have all of those emails,to and from, since the beginning of time to be written to my hard drive.

I'd ideally want the detailed sending info to be displayed, and to have it all be concatenated into one file.

I'd like all attachments, too, although those can't be concatenated of course.

I need a complete record of all communications with the senders, both sent by me and received from them, with identifying headers, in chronological order and in such a way that it can be presented in court.

I want to ultimately produce a single text file that can be edited and annotated.
posted by StickyCarpet to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I've used Mine My Mail to do this before (for a small fee)... Just sort what you want downloaded by applying a label to it, then export as a spreadsheet.
posted by teststrip at 9:24 AM on September 9, 2013 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I'm pretty sure gmvault will let you limit downloads by a search term. Also, it sounds like you need to read up on gmail's search options if you're having trouble finding the messages you need.
posted by primethyme at 9:32 AM on September 9, 2013 [1 favorite]


Best answer: This is probably not the most efficient way to do this, but I needed to do something similar and did the following:

1. Open another GMail account. Enable IMAP in both accounts.
2. Put both accounts in Thunderbird.
3. Sort the email you want from the one account using GMail and label it something unique. I called it "Discovery".
4. In Thunderbird, drag the Discovery label from original GMail account to new account.
5. This will make the only emails other than the welcome emails, in the new account the ones you want to download.
6. Go to Google Account and using the takeout feature, take all the emails from new account.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:03 AM on September 9, 2013 [3 favorites]


Response by poster: Using Gmail search options with Thunderbird worked.

The only problem was that when I made selections in Gmail, they only held for the current page, so I had to do it page by page through several hundred emails. Reasonably quick enough at that, considering I was on a deadline.

(I'm writing this some time later, I forget exactly where it was in the process that I ran into the page limitation.)
posted by StickyCarpet at 2:08 AM on January 19, 2014


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