While I was migrating my data away from Google, basically I am using Gmail since 2009, I had the problem on how to get my mail data out. It is nice being able to get a data dump, but what if I want to access some of the really old emails or attachments?
Well, I first thought that it is not that easy, but it actually is 🙂
Why migrate in the first place
- Google may read your emails
- Storage becomes expensive after a while
- “Ethical” reasons
Why Roundcube
Here I only have one point to make, or two actually.
- I know Roundcube for years and it is an Open Source webmailer.
- My Synology NAS actually has the app, which also comes with the server part, so Roundcube can have local email files instead of just being a web frontend
Lets get to it
I DuckDuckGo’ed a lot in order to find a way to do this and this blog post is actually done because every single post I did find making it look like you need to download a 3rd Party cloud tool and you need to grant them access to all your emails and they will move it around.
If you decide to leave Google for “Ethical” or privacy reasons I guess we can agree that this isn’t appealing much.
At the end it is easy
- Create an App Password on Google https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en
- Enable Roundcube to do a pop3 of all messages from Gmail
Afterwards you can select if you want to pop and delete or simply pop, but I leave that up to you 🙂
(UPDATE) Like some friendly user pointed out, in the end this only changes the front end, so deleting the emails on Gmail and disabling the service the next step.
(UPDATE 2) In case you find Roundcube unreliable, for whatever reason, imapsync might be a good solution
https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync
Have a great day and be excellent to each other