Re: Cancelling Gmail
 

I have been considering cancelling Gmail for some time but am worried about losing my old gmails as I am into genealogy and have retained some for reference purposes. Is there a way to back these up before cancelling Gmail, if. So how? I am concerned that I may not be able to view historic emails and want to be sure that I can before pulling the plug. Any help would be much appreciated.

Try this: https://www.labnol.org/internet/transfer-gmail/28088/
I haven't used it myself, so cannot vouch for the information.

Mind you, you are likely to lose labels in the process, as they aren't really portable.

There are actually a couple of different approaches you can take here depending on what you want to do.

If you simply want to make sure you have a backup of your messages, and don't care about having "live" access to them, Google's Takeout feature is the easiest option by far. See Google's help article on Downloading your data for more information on how to use this.

Google Takeout will*allow you to download a complete archive of everything in your Gmail box zipped up as one big file. The messages will be in "MBOX" format, which is a standard and highly portable email format that can be imported directly into many standalone email apps at any time. There are also apps such as "Google Takeout Reader" that allow you to read the MBOX file directly. This approach won't preserve your labels in any easily usable format — Google does embed the labels into a header, so they're not lost, but I'm not aware of any email apps or extensions that really know what to do with them.

The other option is to use an IMAP e-mail client such as Thunderbird, Apple Mail, or even Microsoft Outlook and point it at your Gmail account to download all of your messages. In this case, your labels will be preserved as folders in your e-mail client, although messages with multiple labels will appear as copies in multiple folders, so it's not a direct mapping, but at least you'll still have some semblance of organization to it. This will effectively be a "live" copy of your Gmail mailbox, and most mail clients will let you copy these messages en masse to a local folder, at which point they're entirely offline copies that you can search through, use, organize, and reply to, without any connection back to Gmail. You can even upload these to a new IMAP-based provider like FastMail or Runbox, provided of course you have enough online storage on those services to store them all.

Personally, even if you go the IMAP route, I'd recommend using Google Takeout as well. You can never have too many backups, and Takeout makes sure you have ALL of your email messages backed up somewhere separately and is a pretty bullet-proof process. If you don't care about labels at all, you can even disregard the IMAP process and just import the Takeout MBOX file directly into your email client of choice.

Re: Canceling Gmail account
 

Hi Guys,
Thanks for the replies. I now need to give some clarification, as I am confused.Can you tell me whether the Gmail emails already on my Apple Mail account and sorted in to folders, would 'disappear' post cancellation. If the answer is NO, and they would only disappear from my Gmail account, then I do not have a problem.I would only be concerned, if Google could remove them from my account. I just want some assurance, before pulling the plug. I should have said, that I only use Apple Mail. Apologies.

The copies in Apple Mail shouldn't go away if you cancel your Gmail account, simply because they won't be able to log into your Gmail account to synchronize them with the server. If you deleted them from your Gmail account, then, yes, they would disappear from your computer as well the next time Apple Mail synced with Gmail. However, cancelling your Gmail account would be about the same as being offline or unable to log into Gmail for any other reason.

That said, if you want to be absolutely certain, the safest thing to do is copy them ALL to local folders in the "On My Mac" section of Apple Mail. You should be able to just drag-and-drop them, folder by folder, into new local folders.

Note that "On My Mac" is normally hidden if you don't have any folders created in local storage. If you don't see the "On My Mac" section in the Apple Mail sidebar, just create a mailbox folder there manually using "Mailbox -> New Mailbox" and selecting "On my Mac" as the location.

Re: Canceling Gmail account
 

Hi J ,
Thanks for your very helpful reply. I certainly will not be deleting them from my Gmail account, so that sounds fine. The 'belt and braces' suggestion, would be quite time consuming, as I would have to look through hundreds of emails to sort them into separate folders.

Fair enough, although technically they should already be in folders in Apple Mail based on your labels, and you should just be able to drag-and-drop entire folders from the "Gmail" to the "On My Mac" section.

Well, that's assuming you're using IMAP to connect from Apple Mail to your Gmail account. If you're using POP3 to fetch your email, then of course it will just be one big chunk of email in a single folder. However, if you're using POP3, there's even less risk of your messages disappearing from Apple Mail, as POP3 doesn't "sync" with the host server — each message is downloaded locally.

Re:Canceling Gmail
 

Hi J
Thanks for your considerable help.