Gmail – How to export all emails from the Gmail inbox to a .csv file

The Data Liberation Front is a quasi-independent effort at Google to help you free your data if you desire.

It's easy to use a different email reading program with Gmail using either IMAP or POP, or to get all your mail out to take to a different provider. Go to the Settings page (link at top right of Gmail page), Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.

If you can import the EML files into a mail client that support IMAP this will be easy.

It seems that Thunderbird can do this, but I'm not 100% sure. (Don't have a local copy to play with.)

Anyway, set-up Thunderbird to be an IMAP client for Gmail. (Lifehacker has an excellent guide to do this.)

Then, import your EML files into Thunderbird.

If necessary, move them to a temporary folder (called "Zimbra" perhaps) which will be a label in Gmail. Then just wait for IMAP to sync them all to the cloud.

After that you can delete Thunderbird, keep it around to make local archives of your e-mail, or keep using it as your main client.

I was able to do this a couple of years ago with thousands of messages from my Pegasus Mail client. (There was some pain in converting to a format that Thunderbird could read, but getting the messages into Gmail was the easy part.)