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.