Email is used to send important messages, attachments, videos, images, and many other document formats. You probably have tons of emails in your Gmail inbox from historical dates that you want to download. Either you are deleting your email account or looking to keep your emails safe outside your Gmail inbox. Whatever the reason, it’s a good practice to export and save all your emails locally or on the cloud to organize your inbox.
In this step-by-step guide, we’ll explain how you can download emails from Gmail and save it on your local device and online. Let’s get started!
How to Download All Emails from Gmail?
Step 1: Log in to your Gmail account.
Step 2: Go to Google Takeout. Here you can find all the data associated with your Google Account. You can either select all items or just select the “Mail” to download your email data.
Step 3: Click on “Multiple formats” to see the formats your data will be downloaded
Step 4: Click on “All Mail Data Included” and select the message type that you want to download
Step 5: After selecting the necessary email, click on Ok
Step 6: Click on Next Step at the bottom of the page
Step 7: Select “Export Once” if you want to export this one time only. Select “Export Every 2 Months for a Year” to schedule an export for every 2 upcoming months.
Step 8: Select the file type. Currently, you can download your export in two formats “Zip” and “tgz”. Zip files can be opened on any computer while tgz requires additional software to open.
Step 9: Select the file size limit. If the export size exceeds the selected file size, the file will be split into select size chunks.
Step 10: Click on Create Export.
After clicking on Create export, Google will now initiate your download process. You will see a message saying “Google is creating a copy of files from Mail”. This can take from a few minutes to hours/days based on the size of your inbox.
Why Export Your Email from Gmail?
While there are many benefits of downloading all your emails from Gmail, a few of them are:
- Saves you space: Gmail offers 15 GB of free cloud storage which can fill up quite quickly if you send huge data files through your email. Downloading your emails can help you clean up some of that space by deleting emails afterward.
- Safe-keeping: Any important emails can get lost if your inbox receives large traffic. Downloading all your emails can help you keep your email safe for future purposes. If your email gets hacked, you might even lose your account. Therefore, it’s always a best practice to keep your emails safe by downloading them on your local machine or cloud.
- Easy Sharing: You can easily share your downloaded emails to your friends, and colleagues through various other platforms if you have them downloaded on your computer.
