[Alpine-info] Gmail to Mbox format

[Lucio Chiappetti via Alpine-info]

On Sat, 12 Jul 2025, George Gutman via Alpine-info wrote:


> Is there any other way to export Gmail folders into Mbox format than

> Google's Takeout?


Are you talking of saving messages in one or more Gmail folder into local 
folder of your preferred format ?

If you can define a folder collection (Alpine M S L) pointing to Gmail (I 
have one defined as Folders on 
imap.gmail.com:993/ssl/notls/user=xxxxxxx in [Gmail]/

You can enter one of the folders therein (*), select the messages of 
interest and use aggregate command (A S) to save them as a block to a 
local folder (or a folder elsewhere)

(*) note however that non-default folders in Gmail have name quirks. This 
is not important to me, as I use the above folder collection only once 
every day to cleanup the Bin folder, and to check the Spam one.

(the above folder collections shows me only these entries but NOT the 
Gmail inbox: All Mail[/] Bin[/] Drafts[/] Important[/] Sent Mail[/] 
Spam[/] Starred[/] ; I have a folder in the incoming folders pointing to 
the Gmail inbox (and to as couple of inboxes of other providers, say A 
and B.

But in general the Gmail inbox is empty as I instructed Gsuite to forward 
all mail to the A provider inbox, which is almost instantaneous. Also the 
A provider inbox is usually empty, as it is fetched by fetchmail very 5 
minutes to a local inbox.

So, I do not know of ways to export entire folders as an atomic operation, 
but Aggregate Commands can be used to svae/move all messages in a folder 
to any other folder.

-- 
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Corti 12 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
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