Export all my emails from Gmail account as xml

Question

Bizarrely, I have been using an email account to store recipes.

I want to export all the messages to an XML format or similar, which I would be able to easily reproduce on a Wordpress blog or similar. Or simply print out all the recipes, but with some formatting put in place.

Gmail offers an RSS feed for labels, and exporting to external email client and I also found something called backup goo which allows me to export all the mails as files .eml in MIME format.

Anyone shed any light on working with this kind of stuff. Essentially, this may seem like a really frivously problem, but in fact it's a problem of me not being able to access this kind of personal data which I should be able to move elsewhere and represent to myself easily.

Answer 1

You can forward your emails to Thunderbird and use ImportExport tools addons to export all your emails as :

• html.
• csv.
• xls.
• mbox.
• plain text.

Answer 2

Is Gmail the only option, you can use? The default setting for Gmail is to use IMAP protocol for exchanging e-mail. This means, all your e-mails (receipes) are still on GMail server. I would suggest using a different program (mail client) that offers more export options than Gmail.

I can connect to my Gmail account with Mozilla Thunderbird (using standard credentials, like IMAP server address, port, login, password) and browse all the messages from there. And, because this is IMAP, they're synced, not downloaded, so I have exact copy in both Gmail and Thunderbird. I don't remember Thunderbird (haven't been using it for ages! :), but I'm pretty sure that you'll find more export option in there or in any of their plugins, than you would find in Gmail.