Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by bound008 on Thursday December 05, 2013 @04:26PM (#6857371)

I am glad they did this, as a user who already left the big G earlier this year. Its wasn't a big priority though because of IMAP and ICS. I already got my data out. If anything, I hope this helps promote the MBOX format for quickly moving mail around vs. error prone IMAP transitions.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by bad_user on Friday December 06, 2013 @02:38AM (#6859938)

It's pretty cool do download an archive though, instead of going through IMAP, for archival purposes that is. I have a lot of email in my GMail, going back to 2005 I think. I'm afraid of accidentally deleting it, plus I also use other email clients, like Thunderbird and I'm always triple-checking settings to ensure it doesn't delete old emails. Having the option of doing a dump from time to time, for storage, is really cool.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by jlgaddis on Friday December 06, 2013 @07:21AM (#6860725)

Check out "offlineimap" (or similar utilities) that sync your Gmail to your local machine over IMAP. Run that via cron and can back up your mail like normal.

http://offlineimap.org/

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by lukasm on Thursday December 05, 2013 @12:14PM (#6855580)

I have ambivalent feelings about this. All in all, this is my stuff.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by resu_nimda on Thursday December 05, 2013 @02:32PM (#6856591)

To play devil's advocate - you willingly gave it to them, with almost zero contractual expectations. In a technical sense it is their stuff, and they have graciously implemented a feature allowing you to retrieve a copy of it.

I definitely agree that it's the "right" thing to do, but this kind of comment speaks of entitlement and lack of personal responsibility. They're offering a service, they don't have any inherent obligation, and you can choose not to use it.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by fragsworth on Thursday December 05, 2013 @04:03PM (#6857206)

Absolutely not. The implicit agreement is that they provide a service to hold, manage, and use your stuff, and you give up a certain amount of privacy by allowing them to see it - and they get to advertise at you while you use the service, and maybe make money in other ways off your information.

So in other words, it really is your stuff. Imagine if they locked your accounts from you out of malice - it's legal gray area, since I don't believe there have been any court cases, but I'm pretty sure the result would be obvious. You would easily be able to sue them to get back your access to it.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by resu_nimda on Thursday December 05, 2013 @04:31PM (#6857403)

Why would you have the expectation of an implicit agreement? There is no implicit agreement, that's an unfounded assumption by the user.

I imagine they could completely shut down all unpaid gmail access at any moment with no legal implications (though I haven't read the fine print, and in that extreme case the courts would probably step in just to keep the country running smoothly).

What precedent is there to support your hypothetical lawsuit? I kind of disagree, they would just get a lot of negative PR.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by rhizome on Thursday December 05, 2013 @04:39PM (#6857466)

If Google simply shut down Gmail, their stockholders would pretty much fire the entire leadership of the company. It would be professional suicide to approve something like that.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by tonfa on Thursday December 05, 2013 @06:19PM (#6858119)

I wonder if Page, Brin and Schmidt (the majority stockholders) would fire Larry, Sergei and Eric.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by rhizome on Friday December 06, 2013 @03:59PM (#6863760)

There would certainly be a change of leadership due to the change in the business that shutting down gmail would cause. The PR hit would be huge, and I'd WAG that majority rule would not be enough to keep them in place.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by sjwright on Thursday December 05, 2013 @10:24PM (#6859188)

I see what you did there.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by bad_user on Friday December 06, 2013 @02:51AM (#6859971)

Implementing exporting features takes time and money. If such things would come for free, then they would have an obligation.

Yes, it's your stuff and I don't agree with the parent. But you're not necessarily entitled to features for an easy export of that stuff. That's the kind of agreement that has to be explicit in order for you to feel entitled.

Anyway, if you want fair treatment and to feel like a customer and not a product, you should pay for using it. I'm on Google Apps, I have my own domain and email address, I can always move, I don't get adds, I can use the Exchange protocol, I have more options for importing/exporting and the email support has been very responsive for me. From what I hear Office 365 is a solid option lately and there's also FastMail.fm and others.

And btw, allowing them to advertise in your Inbox does not make you the customer, you're just a user of free stuff. And free stuff is great, but not when you depend on it (unless it's open-source :))

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by donniezazen on Thursday December 05, 2013 @10:52PM (#6859296)

I have ambivalent feelings too but more in a gracious sense. I have long hold the philosophy that data should be treated as a consumer's personal property. Companies have reasonable rights to refuse to serve but they shouldn't be given authority to confiscate consumer's personal property and close their accounts unless warranted by the law of the land.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by justincormack on Thursday December 05, 2013 @05:28PM (#6857825)

I am paying them for this so I expect more.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by JohnTHaller on Thursday December 05, 2013 @09:56PM (#6859105)

You can expect what they've laid out in the contract you agreed to.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by rhizome on Thursday December 05, 2013 @04:37PM (#6857452)

A person who lived by this "technical" principle would likely find that their friends no longer wanted to loan them anything. After all, there is no "inherent obligation" for you to return anything, right?

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by MBlume on Thursday December 05, 2013 @04:46PM (#6857504)

What? Yes, there is, that's what "loan" means.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by rhizome on Thursday December 05, 2013 @06:04PM (#6858061)

It's only because data does not have legal status as property. It doesn't keep people from feeling a similar degree of ownership over the data they store with Google et al, though, and I think it points to a democratic desire for these data-retrieval acts and implementations to be more than goodwill. The third-party doctrine is only a convention, after all.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by jmathai on Thursday December 05, 2013 @12:39PM (#6855760)

Agreed but it takes time, effort and money to make sure that you can take your stuff with you.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by ithkuil on Thursday December 05, 2013 @12:46PM (#6855808)

Yes, after all, you already could access your email via imap and do the backup by yourself.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by tedunangst on Thursday December 05, 2013 @02:34PM (#6856605)

Until you get the "lockdown in sector 4" error message and have to sit in the timeout corner to start again. It took me over 48 hours to actually download all my mail out of gmail. (about two years ago.)

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by outworlder on Thursday December 05, 2013 @02:36PM (#6856619)

Have you actually tried? There is throttling in place, meaning it can take ages depending on your account size.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by bradbatt on Thursday December 05, 2013 @01:19PM (#6856030)

My mom couldn't. Nor about 95% of the rest of my friends and family. But clicking export and then download? All of them can do that.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by Groxx on Thursday December 05, 2013 @01:28PM (#6856113)

Really? Every email application I've used in the past few years asks for your name / email address / password on the first wizard-page. They automatically detect gmail, hook everything up, and start downloading without any further steps.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by smithzvk on Thursday December 05, 2013 @01:50PM (#6856282)

Yes, to the point that it is very easy to crash Thunderbird if you blindly hook it into your GMail account.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by Groxx on Thursday December 05, 2013 @01:56PM (#6856334)

I've never had that problem. I have plenty of other annoyances with Thunderbird (so much that I'm paying for what's essentially a custom UI), but it's usually stable. It hasn't complained when I've hooked up a half-dozen accounts, collectively about a half-million emails, and it did everything reasonably quickly.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by smithzvk on Friday December 06, 2013 @05:24PM (#6864284)

Hmmm... not seeing the same behavior today. There have been upgrades in the meantime, of course, but I doubt that this was addressed. Must have been something off that day. It did run off and start downloading the header of every single message in my GMail account, which I would rather it didn't as I really only care about the mail that I have received recently (I only use Thunderbird for encrypted emails but the web interface otherwise). That is still annoying, but since I don't want to bad mouth people with false information:

Let the record show that Thunderbird no longer becomes unresponsive for me when accessing my GMail account, must have been a glitch on that day when I first set up GMail in Thunderbird.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by Groxx on Friday December 06, 2013 @08:03PM (#6864897)

haha, I don't mean to imply that it's impossible that it did that, just that it shouldn't be normal :) usually bugs like that are fixed pretty quickly, especially for something as widely-used as gmail.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by ithkuil on Thursday December 05, 2013 @01:53PM (#6856305)

That's exactly why this thing is useful and appreciated.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by bowlofpetunias on Thursday December 05, 2013 @01:58PM (#6856342)

"We would never trap user data"

No, we just use a different definition of "user data" than most privacy and civil rights laws.

Or can I soon expect to be able to download all the data anything from Google+ buttons, YouTube to Doubleclick ads have gathered on me?

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by IanCal on Thursday December 05, 2013 @02:07PM (#6856415)

I think this is fairly obvious but there's a clear difference between "data belonging to a user" and "data about a user". The first is what they are talking about, because this is how vendor lock-in occurs.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by Florin_Andrei on Thursday December 05, 2013 @03:45PM (#6857092)

Yes, there is a difference, absolutely.

No, the line between the two categories is not clear at all.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by IanCal on Friday December 06, 2013 @02:55AM (#6859981)

Can you give me an example of an ambiguous case? I can't think of any personally.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by JW_00000 on Friday December 06, 2013 @09:35AM (#6861179)

Well, the URLs I enter in Chrome for example: is that data belonging to me because I entered it, or is it data about me because they track it?

Or even the connections I have on Google+: is it data belonging to me because I entered it?

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by IanCal on Friday December 06, 2013 @10:54AM (#6861659)

You're not really handing over URLs to google saying "here are some urls, please keep them", are you? Bookmarks, yes, and you can easily export them.

> Or even the connections I have on Google+: is it data belonging to me because I entered it?

Yes. Google takeout lets you download your G+ circles, if that helps.

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by psbp on Thursday December 05, 2013 @02:33PM (#6856602)

https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads

https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by andyhmltn on Friday December 06, 2013 @04:20AM (#6860227)

That first link is hilarious. I looked at my 'interests' based on my searches and apparently I really enjoy Athletics and Chevrolet. Weird considering I don't like either haha

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by Kerrick on Thursday December 05, 2013 @03:51PM (#6857129)

You can download your data from the +1 Buttons at least. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024195?hl=en#plu...

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Re:Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data by lalalalalalala on Thursday December 05, 2013 @03:42PM (#6857078)

You can already get your data for many things

https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard

Individual datasets are not of much group to advertisers

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