How To Export An Archive Of Your Gmail Mailbox, And Open It "Offline" With Thunderbird On Mac - PART TWO - Thunderbird Setup

 Allright, in PART ONE of this saga I showed you how to export your Gmail data.

Now in PART TWO, we setup Thunderbird to open and browse the data.

1. Google exported a zip file that we've downloaded on our computer. In my case it's called: "takeout-20251103T234620Z-3-001.zip", and is in my Download folder.

2. Move the file to a location of your choice, in my case I put it in my Documents folder, inside a subfolder that I renamed "Gmail Takeout Zips". Open the zip file, and the following is decompressed: "Takeout" folder, "Mail" subfolder", "Work/Moviola.mbox" folder. All the messages/data is contained in the ".mbox" folder. Remember I elected to export only one of my labels/Gmail folder, so my dataset / .mbox folder is small. If you were to export your entire Gmail data, the size of the .mbox will likely be way larger, and possibly will come in multiple parts due to the file size option/constrain imposed by Google. I previously exported a Work-DVDList folder, so the corresponding Takeout and decompressed .mbox is also present.

4. Create a new Folder in Documents, and name it "Thunderbird Read Gmail Archives". Copy the ".mbox" files in it. You can then eliminate the remaining emptied Takeout folders. Your setup should look like this:

5. Launch Thunderbird. When presented with the Welcome screen / "Setup your existing email address", Click on Cancel.

6. "No email account configured" pops up, check "Use Thunderbird without an email account" and click "Exit Setup".

7. Thunderbird opens on the Privacy Notice page / tab.

8. Go to: File / New / Feed Account

9. Give the account a name, I choose "Mail Archives - READ ONLY", and click Continue.

10. Thunderbird pops a Feed Account Wizard confirmation window, click Done.

11. You now have a "Mail Archives - READ ONLY" feed in the list. Right Click on the name to reveal a pop-up menu.

12. Click on Settings.

13. For the Message Storage  / Local Directory, Click on Browse

14. Select the "Thunderbird Read Gmail Archives" containing the .mbox folders, and click Open.

15. Thunderbird needs to restart pop-up, click Restart.

16. Thunderbird restarts and now in the local directory points at the correct folder:

17. Click on the Mail Archives - READ ONLY feed tab, and the mailboxes show up:

18. You can now browse, search, export individual messages:

And that's a wrap!

How To Export An Archive Of Your Gmail Mailbox, And Open It "Offline" With Thunderbird On Mac - PART ONE - Gmail Export

 Warning! This is a loooong thread, thanks Google, so hang in there!

PART ONE, let's export from Gmail:

1. Click on the Gmail account Icon, click on "Manage your Google Account"

2. When in your Google account page, click on the Data & privacy tab on the left.

3. When in the Data & privacy page, scroll down to get to the "Download your data" area.

4. Click on the Download your data. It will open the Google Takeout page. This is where you can choose what data you want to export. There are TONS of data, and some selection is already made by default as you can see. But we do not want that.

5. So click on "Deselect all". That will deselect some of the data, not all unfortunately, so you have to scroll down and deselect each box manually. Continue to scroll down and deselect all the boxes, until you get to the Mail area.

6. Click to select Mail. By default, "All Mail data included" is selected which will export EVERYTHING. You may or may not want to export your entire Mail content. If you do, you can skip the next steps and go directly to step 13.

7. On the other end, if you want to choose which part of Mail to export, click on "All Mail data included". This will open the "Mail content option" page. And by default "Include all messages in Mail" is selected.

8. From there you can choose to select only some mailbox folders to export.

9. If needed then, deselect "Include all messages in Mail", and scroll down and deselect the default folders you do not wish to export / select the folders you only want to export.

10. For example, I do not wish to export "Archived", "Chat", "Drafts", "Inbox" that are all selected by default, so I uncheck them all.

11. I only want to export "Work/Moviola", so I checked that. I previously exported "Work/DVDList". And I click "OK".

12. Now instead of the default "All Mail data included", it shows "1 label selected", which corresponds to my single selection of "Work/Moviola".

13. Now scroll down and click on "Next step"

14. In the "Choose file type, frequency & destination" you are presented with frequency, file type, and file size options. I leave everything at default. Then click "Export".

15. Google asks for identification, so fill-in your info.

16. When Google finishes prepping the export, you will get an email with a link to download. You can also view the available download sets by clicking on "Manage exports".

17. I have two completed Data backups available to download. The one I want is the most recent, so I click on the top arrow.

18. From there I can click on the Download button to get it transferred to my computer.

19. The Zip file is downloaded onto my computer.

And we are done with the Google Mail export. Go to PART TWO for the Thunderbird How-to.