Please explain if and how I can download my gmails to review offline and delete selected ones from gmail
I saw old archived question that seemed to approximate what I want to do. I've been using gmail for over 15 years. Recently I began getting messages telling me I was running out of space and to delete emails or purchase more space. I have nearly 64,000 messages on google's server. What I wanted to do was download all of them to a local machine then take my time offline to delete the ones I want to get rid of and keep what I want. I personally don't care if I have to leave gmail altogether (perhaps that is really a good thing), but I do want to keep stuff important to me for business and personal reasons and maybe organize them in a better way, although I have over years created many labels and folders in gmail for that purpose.
I'm not clear on all the syncing and deleting stuff but I know that in the end I don't want to leave anything on gmail's server. I just want all my old emails I choose to keep available offline as a database. Some of the senders may no longer exist or their emails changed, but the content and attachments in some cases are important to me.
And this brings me to clearly not understanding the disk space issue. I have plenty of local disk space, so I don't think when T-bird says I'm running out of disk space it's what I think it is. Also, I'd rather not have my Windows system drive to be used to store any of the downloaded emails. It's a small SSD. I want to keep my installed programs and applications as much as possible in other drives, but it seems like T-bird's installation uses that system drive. I see where that could come to a disk space problem.
How can I best use T-bird to download my 64,000 emails to my local machine? Once I did that, I could simply bulk delete old emails by date from the gmail server. That would solve my "you're running out of disk space , purchase more space from us" problem with google. Then, I'd like to move towards using gmail less and less. I don't think I'll get rid of it altogether because my email with them has become known to many people I do business with and family and friends.
Can someone give me basic information on if I could install T-bird in a manner and local location to have it store my local emails in a drive other than my Windows system drive. Also, I'd appreciate any suggestions or tips on if what I am thinking of doing can be done or if there is a better way of doing it.
I'm attaching a screenshot of the message I'm getting now when I try to continue downloading my gmails locally.
My humble thanks in advance
All Replies (3)
re :not understanding the disk space issue. I have plenty of local disk space, so I don't think when T-bird says I'm running out of disk space
It may mean you are running out of space on the server; you have used up quota.
You can check to see if you have already got full copies downloaded. Go into 'Offline' mode. click on 'Two blue screen icon' in bottom left of Status Bar, it will turn into a 'two black screen icon' when in Offline mode. If you cannot read contents of emails then you do not have a full copy downloaded. Let me know if you cannot read contents of your various emails and I'll provide additional info.
If you can read the contents of any selected email then you have a full copy downloaded of that email. Do the following: Create some folders in 'Local Folders' mail account. Strongly recommend you create several folders, so the emails are better organised. When you download full copies of emails, they are stored one after the other in the order downloaded in a single mbox file. So at the moment you have everything - all your emails in just one simple text file called Inbox. This is very risky.
Right click on highlighted email(s) and select 'Copy to' > 'Local Folders' > select folder. Check you can read the contents of emails. If yes, then you have a full copy stored on your computer that is not related to the imap account. Once you have copied all the emails from the imap Inbox into various folders in 'Local Folders', you can delete the emails from the imap Inbox folder. Then go back to 'Online' mode - click on 'Two black screen icon' to change to 'two blue screen icon'.
Modified by Toad-Hall
Let me know if you had full copies and were able to get copies into various folders into 'Local Folders' mail account.
Yes, I can view even the first message from 2005. When I select a message with an attachment, I can download the attachment. So, I'm pretty sure that the 16,123 messages so far downloaded are on my local computer, although I'm not sure exactly where.
Yes, I think that disk space issue is with gmail - or rather, with Google. I found out that the "free" space of nearly 20 GB that they pitched was actually used up by storing photos from your smart phone in Google Photos and often files you had not intention of uploading to Google Drive. They may have told you about it somewhere in those legalese EULAs nobody ever reads. I just found out now after deleting thousands of emails from my Gmail account and then emptying the trash bin.
They now want me to start purchasing space. I wonder how many people know that's where Google is taking them. Apple does the same with their iCloud and Microsoft with their OneDrive. Geesh.