How to Back up Your Gmail to a Local Mailbox the Easy Way


Gmail logo

Your Gmail e-mail don’t have to are living on Google’s servers eternally. Here’s how to obtain every thing in your Gmail account as a file and convert it into a browsable, searchable offline archive on your computer—the effortless way.

Obtain Your Emails With Google Takeout

Initial, down load an archive of every little thing in your Gmail account by Google Takeout. Head to the Google Takeout web page and indication in with your Google account.

Find what you want to down load listed here. By default, all the info affiliated with your Google account is chosen.

To download only your Gmail, simply click “Deselect all” at the top rated of the web page. Scroll down and enable the checkbox upcoming to “Mail” to pick out only your Gmail.

Be aware: The “Mail” choice includes all email messages and file attachments in your Mail account. To down load other connected data these kinds of as your Contacts, Jobs, Calendar situations, or Hangouts chat heritage, find the suitable solutions in the list.

When you’ve selected what you want to download, scroll down and click on the “Next Step” button.

Go through the relaxation of the system, picking out whatsoever choices you like, and click on “Create export.”  Depending on the measurement of your archive, it may possibly acquire Google some time to produce the archive for you to download—or it may well be extremely speedy. You will have just one 7 days to down load the archive of your email messages at the time it’s created.

The Google Takeout file will be in ZIP kind. The file you obtain will be named one thing like “takeout-[something].zip”.

Extract its contents with your favorite file unarchiver. For instance, on Windows 10, you can just appropriate-simply click the ZIP file, decide on “Extract All,” and click the “Extract” button.

You are going to get a “Takeout” folder. Within, you’ll uncover a “Mail” folder that retains all your Gmail e-mail in MBOX structure.

Import Your Gmail Emails Into Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird, the cost-free and open-resource e-mail consumer, is the ideal way to search this e-mail archive. To proceed, download Mozilla Thunderbird. It’s accessible for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

This approach is a very little puzzling to established up in Thunderbird, so follow our manual to opening an MBOX file in Thunderbird. The moment you are done—it just will take a couple of clicks, really—you’ll be able to browse and search the contents of your Gmail archive in Mozilla Thunderbird.

It works totally offline—you can now back again up your Gmail archive to any storage product and use Mozilla Thunderbird any time you want to obtain its contents.

Connected: How to Open up an MBOX File (Using Mozilla Thunderbird)


You can now even delete your Google account if you like. But be guaranteed to again up your nearby archive so that you never get rid of it!

Exit mobile version