Email conversations, whether regular or business-related, are one of the important sets of data you maintain on the internet. Generally, we never care about preserving them as email accounts are typically used for a lifetime. What if the service suddenly suspends your account? In such a case, you will lose all your email conversations. Sounds scary? Well, it's always a good practice to export and back up your email conversations, at least once a year. Today, we'll learn how to export emails from Gmail and Proton accounts. Once exported, you can use your preferred backup method to archive these emails.
Almost all of the popular email services provide an option to export the data in one way or another. I've picked the two most widely used platforms. Follow the insturctions to export emails from them.
If you are using any other email service, the process may be different depending on how the exported data is processed. Anyways, let's get started and focus on the export process of these two platforms.
Exporting Emails from a Gmail Account
Let's first go through the process of exporting emails from a Gmail account. It may take a few minutes to several hours, depending on how huge your email archive is. Here's how to do it.
First, go to the Google Takeout page. It's a standard utility to extract data from dozens of Google services.
Click the 'Deselect all' button to ensure no other Google service is selected for data export.
Scroll down and select the checkbox for the Mail service. The emails will be exported in the MBOX format, and the user settings in the JSON format.
By default, all types of emails are included in the export, but you can change that by clicking the 'All Mail data included' option.
A dialogue will appear where you can deselect the 'Include all messages in Mail' option. Now, scroll down and check the checkboxes picking the type of emails (labels, archives, starred, trashed, snoozed, and much more) you want to export. Finally, click the OK button.
After selecting the email data you want in the export, scroll down and click the 'Next step' button.
In this step, you can first choose the destination for the exported file. By default, a notification email—with the download link—will be sent. That's what most people prefer.
But if you want to save the export file directly to a cloud storage service, you can do that too.
As far as export frequency is concerned, almost everyone wants a one-time export. So leave this option in its default state.
And now comes the important 'File size' option. If you have a huge email archive and want to export the files in smaller chunks, you can choose the chunk size from 1GB to 50GB.
After customizing all the above options, click the 'Create export' button. Now, as soon as the export file creation process is complete, an email will arrive in your inbox with a download page link.
Click on the link in the email and you'll be redirected to the download page. Here, you can see the size of the zipped file. Click the Download button to save it on your computer.
Exporting Emails from a Proton Account
The export process for Proton Mail is a bit different. Proton provides a standalone utility for the same. You have to download and extract it on your system to export the emails. Let's see how to do it.
Go to the All settings → Backup and export menu option and click the 'Download the Proton Mail Export Tool' button.
Depending on your operating system, click the appropriate button to download the utility. After downloading, extract the zip file's content into your preferred folder.
In Windows, simply double-click the .exe file to start the CLI tool. On other operating systems, open a shell terminal and go to the folder where you've extracted the tool. Now, fire the following command.
./proton-mail-export-cliIt'll start the exporting tool in the command-line environment.
First, authenticate and log in to your Proton account. If two-factor authentication is active, you have to pass that too.
Thereafter, press B and hit Enter to select the Backup option. You'll be prompted for the destination path for the exported emails. By default, it is in the same folder as the tool you've extracted.
Type Yes and hit Enter to start the mail exporting process. Depending on the volume of emails, it may take some time. Once the process is finished, you can zip the folder where the exported emails are stored.
Optionally, you can upload it to your preferred cloud storage service.
Conclusion
Backing up your emails isn’t just a good habit—it’s essential for protecting your digital communication history. Whether you rely on Gmail's Takeout service or Proton’s intuitive export tools, having local or cloud-based backups gives you control and peace of mind.
Take a few minutes today to set up an email backup system to ensure you never lose your important conversations. Your future self will thank you.
