Exporting E-mails from Google Mail

To back up all email messages in your RCC Google Mail account, you could configure a local desktop email program (like Outlook or Thunderbird) and then tell it to download all of your messages (or see the "Account Backup" alternative step further below). However, you may only need to protect some messages, or extract a set of emails for a specific purpose. This tutorial will focus on methods to backup only some of your emails, or extract them in a form suitable for uploading elsewhere or passing along to someone else.

The first step is to identify which emails to export. In RCC Google Mail, the best tool for this is the Label, which is used as a substitute for email subfolders, but also has the advantage that any one email can have as many Labels as you want. (See this page for detailed instructions on how to use Labels.)

1. Using RCC Google Mail's search feature, find some or all of the emails you want, select them by either checking the little box to the left of each email or choose All on the Select field at the top of the first message
2. Click the Labels button. Either assign an existing label or create a new label for the searched emails. NOTE: If you are using an existing label, ensure that the existing messages on that label is what you needed for this task.
3. Repeat as needed, adding or removing Labels until all of the emails you want have been marked.

After completing the task above, you have several options:

1. Print all the emails - one email at a time.
2. Print out the email including its full header.*
   *Use this option if you are just creating a backup of your message(s); however it can be read back into Outlook or Thunderbird if needed.
   1. View each email, then select Show original from the drop-down menu at the top-right of the email next to Reply. This will open the message in another browser window.
   2. On your browser's window, go to File - Save Page As. This will open the Save As window.
   3. Specify a suitable filename - preferably ending in .eml and location for the file. The resulting text file is an exact copy of the raw data of the email
3. Extract emails using an Email Extraction program

Extracting emails using an extraction program

There are several tools available which will extract a large collection of raw-text emails from RCC Google Mail for you, quickly and easily, and even let you upload them again to a different account. For this tutorial, we'll use a free tool called IMAPSize. The free program is available at http://www.broobles.com/imapsize/index.php

1. Once you've installed the program, run it to get to the main control screen. You will get a dialog box with the message You don't have an accounts specified. Would you like to add an account? Click Yes, this will open up the Add Account window.
   
2. Fill out all the information needed on the the Add Account window.
   
   1. On the Account field, enter the name for the account (i.e. I used "Work" for my own RCC account)
   2. On the Username field, enter your full email address (i.e jdoe@sunyrockland.edu)
   3. On the Password field, enter your email account's password
   4. On the Server field, enter imap.gmail.com
   5. On the Port field, enter 993
   6. Check the Secure Connection and Smart INBOX
   7. Cick OK to save.
   8. After you've created an account profile, you can always view or edit your profile by going to View - Option.
3. Go to Account Menu and choose Check Size. It may ask for your email password first.
   
4. You should see some activity at the bottom right of the IMAPSize window. If you see an error message, go to View - Options to double-check your account settings, and try again.
   
5. If its successful, you should see a list of all the RCC Google Mail Labels/Folders in your account, including some built-in folders under [Gmail] - click the little + to see the full list.
   
6. You are now ready to export your chosen emails,
   
   1. Right-click on the Label you previously assigned to those emails, and choose Get Message List from the pop-up menu. It may take a moment, then you'll see all of the emails with that Label listed in the bottom half of the IMAPSize window.
      
   2. Right-click the Label again, but this time choose Download Messages then To *.eml files, and create or choose a new empty subfolder to hold the exported email files. This process will take a while, you can see its progress at the bottom-right of the window.
      
   3. You should eventually see a pop-up message saying something like 150/150 messages saved, if the two numbers don't match you may want to try these last steps again in another empty folder.
      

Created: 2/15/11