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For better or for worse, Google’s constant nagging about my shrinking storage space worked. I had already dropped most of their other products but have been using Photos to share images, and Mail has been my primary address for awhile. I’ll continue to use both products but I used the download your data function to export everything so that I can wipe the accounts and start fresh. The images were easy to manage. But Google Mail exports as an MBOX file and that caused me some problems.

To be frank, I’d never really thought about moving my email out of Google Mail storage. Most of my storage space was consumed by my photos, which took about 15 GB of my available 19 GB of free space. If getting rid of Google’s storage space nags was my only goal, I could have stopped with downloading my Google Photos.

As a comparison, Google Photos are exported as individual images. I had not compressed any of them, so the downloads were all the original files. There were .json files for each image, which I deleted because I didn’t need them, using this command line:

c:> del *.json /s

They are also organized into folders, some based on the albums you had created and some based on the time at which they were uploaded. This is enough for me. I have a networked attached storage device where I keep my other photos backed up. It’ll be relatively easy to merge the collections. The only issue I will have is looking out for duplicates.

Now that I’d exported my photos, I wondered why I shouldn’t also do the same thing with email?

Google Mail Takeout

I wasn’t really sure what I would get with Google Mail though. There are so many email formats that they could choose. I could have investigated but it wouldn’t have mattered as I was going to export the email anyway. What I did know is that I wanted to eventually get it into Microsoft Outlook’s Outlook Data file (or Personal Information Storage format), the .pst.

When the message from Google arrived, I started to download my “takeout” of email. I do not know what would have happened if I’d split the download. My Photos had downloaded in 2GB increments. For Mail, I set the download to be 4 GB, which meant that all of my email downloaded at once.

I am adding this to my list of things lawyers might want to do with their email when they close a matter. When there’s a closed file, there’s no need to leave the related emails in your active email account. A lawyer could export the files from Google Mail, and save an MBOX or PST file with the other digital closed files.

The Takeout file contained a number of files but the key one was the email. It was in the MBOX format. I had not dealt with that before and so now the challenge was to try to get those emails into a format that I could get into Microsoft Outlook. It was only as I started poking around that I realized this might be more of a challenge than I had expected.

My Outlook and Exchange skills are a bit rusty but I eventually found my former go-to site, Slipstick. It is like a StackExchange but just for Outlook. It was where I’d go in the past looking for utilities and plugins and bits of script to add to Outlook forms and the like. The forums were the most valuable part of the site. But I hit a dead end looking for easy ways to convert an MBOX to pst.

I am referring to Outlook Classic and not Outlook New. As you can see from the chart, under App Framework, the new version does not support .PST files. It’s listed as upcoming but I’m leery about making that transition. The entire File menu is gone in the new version from what I can tell, including the import and export options and the ability to manage data files. It means that, if the email account is ever compromised, the scope of email exploited won’t be every client the lawyer has ever interacted with.

I had been hopeful that Slipstick would have some good solutions because there weren’t a lot of great ones coming up in web search. I mean, there were plenty, but they involved licensing a conversion tool of unknown quality. And, because it involved Microsoft Outlook and possible corporate licenses, the licenses were geared to businesses. I found one for $19 but decided to dig around a bit further. Since this was probably a one-time process, I didn’t really want to pay to license something. If time matters, paying the license would make sense.

One suggestion that many of the blog posts about MBOX to pst conversion mention was to use Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client. I have used Thunderbird before to create mail backups from a variety of online email servers, the same as I have with Outlook. The process is the same:

  • Connect the email client to your email account so that you can see your email in Outlook or Thunderbird. It will prompt you to create this connection the first time you start either one if you don’t already have email set up. But you can add additional accounts (in Thunderbird under Settings, in Outlook under the File menu)
  • In Thunderbird, right click on Local Folders and add a new folder. In Outlook, go to File then Account Settings. Select the Data Files tab and click Add. Type in the name you want for your new .PST file and navigate to the folder you want it created in. Click OK.
  • Now you can drag and drop email from your online account to your local file. Thunderbird will store it in your local Thunderbird profile. Outlook will store it in the .PST file you created, in whatever folder you chose.

So why didn’t I do this with my Google Mail? I was trying to back up GMail’s All Mail folder. That folder doesn’t appear by default in Outlook when you connect your GMail account. I tried a couple of workarounds but was unable to get the email to move over to Outlook. I ended up with some email moving over and some not and not being able to tell which was which. As soon as you delete an All Mail item in Outlook, GMail appears to recreate it. There was no way to flag for GMail that it should synchronize changes up to itself from Outlook; it just pushed them down.

Thunderbird has a free MBOX importer. So if you are comfortable with Thunderbird, you could stop here. I have often thought about standardizing on Thunderbird but all of my workplaces have been Microsoft Outlook and there’s that minor amount of friction in learning a new app.

The tip was to then drag your Thunderbird emails “onto your desktop” and that would create .eml email files. Once you’d created a folder full of emails, you could switch to Outlook and drag them onto your Outlook folder. Problem solved.

Well, you know what they say about wishful thinking. I could not get that to work for me. Outlook imported the .eml files but they weren’t visible. Outlook gave an error that they weren’t readable.

I was about to pay my $19 when I stumbled across a very old post that pointed to a utility I hadn’t heard of: Address Magic. It was free and a bit old (2017) but these email formats haven’t hanged in a while. I figured I’d give it a shot.

Address Magic MBOX to PST Conversion

The Address Magic utility is available on its own website. The company that created it shut down in 2022 and left the app freely available. They also have a free AOL email converter for those early adopters out there. CNET’s Download site also has a copy and, since the owner is now defunct, I expect that’ll be a pretty stable link.

It’s a very simple, old school style utility. No real “wizard”. Three questions:

  • What do you want to convert?
  • What input format? Some oldies but goodies here: Netscape Communicator, Eudora Light, AOL Webmail, AOL Communicator, Yahoo!, iCloud. You need to specify where your MBOX file is at this point.
  • What output format?

That’s it. I had 36,000 messages and it took about 10 minutes but completed the process without a problem. What I hadn’t expected was that it would inject it into my current Outlook default account. So, before it synchronized it with my personal online account, I clicked on Outlook’s Work Offline button.

I do not normally keep email for more than about 90 days. Unless I’m a record keeper at work for the email’s content, I don’t need it. And most emails are transient topics. But during my brother’s detention, I was saving a lot of emails for posterity. Like the one from the guy who wanted a contract to be dropped into Russia and covertly be swapped for my brother, serving out Paul’s sentence in his place. But I don’t need to keep them in my live email file any longer.

The import looked really clean. I clicked on a bunch of files, especially ones with attachments. I think a lot of the bulk I’d accumulated was from people sending PDFs and photos. All the emails were where I expected them to be and the attachments all opened. I am not a huge fan of attachments but this is one example where having the attachment means not having to wonder whether the linked file exists or not.

I opened a pre-existing .PST file and dragged the new folder in my personal Outlook account over to the local .PST file. The copy took some minutes but worked just like any other drag and drop message move in Outlook. Now I could detach the .PST file until I needed to access it. And I can back it up for preservation and retrieval.

In future, I am going to use the simpler option: connect your account via Outlook (if it isn’t already), open the local .PST file (if it isn’t already), and drag the active contents over to the archival folder. But it is good to know that, if I need to do something with Google Takeout in the future, I have a utility that will allow me to do it.