The problem

I have been using Gmail for over 10 years, very like its interface and labels, especially the automatic reminder when an email is read but not replied in a few days time. But my university email can not be handled by Gmail after 2022 because of the stupid office/outlook “security” setup. This forced me to use third party email client, I am not saying that they are not good, it is me who can still not be able to handle them smoothly as Gmail. I am currently using Thuderbird, I would say one of the best free software on the market. Even so, it can not responds as fast as I expected (maybe because my computer is too old) with almost 100k emails. To make it runs faster, I need to archive the emails in Gmail and download them locally.

This is a simple tutorial for that. If you want all emails to be downloaded go directly to step 4!

1. Go to your gmail account and make sure to use All Mail instead of inbox:

1. Select custom range to specify the dates between which the emails will be downloaded:

1. You probably have many emails like me, you need to click the blue sentence Select all conversations that match this search. It suppose to work as it suggested, but I found this sometimes can be incomplete. If you decide to click all the emails one page after another, wait for seconds or mins until the there are more emails come up without being ticked! Then, redo the same process again. Until there is no email showing up. This has to be done many time if you have a very large amount of emails like me. Otherwise, your downloaded Archieved emails in next step will be incomplete!

1. Go to your google account, then click data and privacy:

1. scroll down to Gmail part:

1. Click download under Gmail:

1. If you don’t do the archive steps before, you can directly download all your emails in Gmail by simply click next step. Otherwise, click All mail data included:

1. Then, only select the Archived:

1. By clicking next step, you will get an email about the downloading link of your Archieved emails:

Leave a message if you encounter any problems.