Hacking Gmail

Exporting Your Mail

T

he hallmark of a truly great web application is the ease with

which you can remove your data should you want to leave.

In the words of the poet, if you love someone set them free.

Sadly, Gmail doesn’t make it easy to get your mail out of there.

There’s no built-in facility to do so at all, at least at the time of

this writing. Of course, many would say that Gmail is so shiny

that you’d be mad to stop using it. Maybe so, but in this chapter

you look at how to do that anyway.

Exporting as a Massive Text File

The first way to export your mail, and the simplest, is to dump

the lot to a big text file — illustrated in Listing 14-1. It’s not very

useful for re-importing your mail into another application, but it

is good for backups of data that you’d like on paper, for example.

Listing 14-1: Export All Mail to a Text File

use Utils;

$gmail = login();

$messages = $gmail->get_messages();

open OUTPUT, “>mailarchive.txt”;

foreach (@{$messages}) {

my $full_message = $gmail->get_indv_email(msg =>

$message);

....print OUTPUT “Sender: “. $full_message-

>{$id}->{“sender_email”}. “\n”;

Continued

̨Converting to a

big text file

̨Converting to

Mbox

̨Appending to IMAP

chapter

in this chapter