Google Takeout is a free tool from Google that hands you a copy of your own Gmail — every message, with the photographs still attached to the letters they came with. It is the way to get a mission’s worth of letters out of an inbox without opening them one at a time.
The setting up takes about ten minutes. The waiting takes longer: Google builds the file in the background and emails you when it is ready, which can be anything from a few minutes to a day or two depending on how much mail is in the account.
First, work out whose inbox to export
This is the step people get wrong, and it is worth a moment because Takeout can only ever export the account you are signed into. It cannot reach across to anybody else’s.
If the weekly letters arrive in your own Gmail — the usual case for a parent on the distribution list — export your own account. The steps below are all you need.
If you are the missionary, and the account is the one the Church provided, the steps below work exactly the same way; sign in to that address instead. Do it soon. Access ends after the mission, and roughly ninety days after release the account is gone for good, taking the sent folder with it — which is the only copy of what was written, as opposed to what was received.
If letters went to several people, each of them has mail nobody else has. A grandparent who was written to directly holds the only copy of those letters. Each person runs this same export from their own account, and the exports are added together afterwards.
What Takeout does, and does not, do
It makes a copy. Your mail stays exactly where it is — nothing is moved, nothing is deleted, and nobody is given access to your account. When it finishes you have a file on your computer and a Gmail that looks the same as it did before.
Inside that file the mail is in a format called mbox: one file holding every message, with the dates, the senders and the attachments intact. You do not need to open it, and the last section of this guide explains why.
Exporting the mail
- Go to takeout.google.com and sign in to the account you settled on above.
- Click Deselect all. Takeout starts with everything Google holds about you ticked, which for most people is tens of gigabytes of Photos and Drive that have nothing to do with this.
- Scroll down to Mail and tick that one box.
- Click Next step at the bottom.
- Leave the delivery method as Send download link via email, set frequency to Export once, and leave the file type as .zip.
- For file size, choose the largest option offered — 50 GB. This does not make the export any bigger. It means Google will not chop the mail into several files.
- Click Create export and close the tab. Google emails you a link when it is done.
If Google splits the export anyway and sends you several files, keep all of them. Nothing is wrong, and all of them can be handed over together.
Checking it actually worked
This step takes one minute and almost nobody does it. An export that quietly came back empty looks exactly like an export that worked, and the difference is usually only discovered months later.
You are not opening the file. You are looking at how big it is.
- Several hundred megabytes or more. That is a real inbox with photographs in it. You are done.
- A few megabytes. Possible for a text-only correspondence, suspicious for anything else. The usual cause is having filtered to a label that did not hold what you thought it did.
- Under a megabyte.Something went wrong. The most common reason by a distance is signing in to the wrong account — the one with no mission letters in it.
If the number looks wrong, do not try to repair the file. Run the export again from the right account; it costs another ten minutes and nothing else.
If the letters are not in Gmail
Plenty of families read their mail somewhere else entirely, and the letters are no less exportable for it. Takeout is Google’s tool for Google accounts, but every major provider has its own version of the same thing.
Outlook, Hotmail or Live
Microsoft’s export lives in the privacy section of your account settings rather than in the mail app, and it produces a .pst file. The simpler route, and the one we would suggest, is to add the account to the Gmail app or to a desktop mail program, let it download everything, and then export from there — it ends in a format more things can read.
iCloud
Apple’s data-and-privacy page offers a mail export, and it takes noticeably longer to produce than Google’s. Start it earlier than you think you need to. Photographs in iCloud shared albums are a separate download again and do not come out with the mail.
Yahoo, AOL, or an address from an internet provider
These rarely offer a proper export. The reliable path is to connect the account to a free Gmail account, which pulls the old mail across, wait for it to finish, and then run Takeout on the Gmail account. It is a detour, but it ends somewhere standard.
Putting several people’s exports together
Most complete missions are assembled from more than one inbox, because no single person was on every letter. A grandparent written to directly has letters nobody else has; a sibling who joined the list late is missing the first six months.
The way to do this badly is to have everybody forward their letters to one person. Forwarding re-dates the messages, re-formats them and sometimes drops the attachments, and you end up with a worse copy of something you already had.
The way to do it properly is for each person to run their own export from their own account and hand over the file as it came. Duplicates are not a problem and should not be weeded out by hand — the same letter appearing in three exports is three chances that one of them kept the attachments.
Optional: only the mission letters
You can export the whole inbox and let the letters be picked out afterwards — that is the simpler path and it costs you nothing but a larger file. If you would rather export only the letters, and you have already been filing them under a Gmail label, click All Mail data included under Mail at step three, turn off Include all messages in Mail, and choose your label. If you have never made a label, skip this entirely.
Making it easier next time
If your missionary is still serving, five minutes now saves the sorting later. In Gmail, open one of the letters, click the three dots, and choose Filter messages like these. Set it to apply a label — their name does the job — and tick Also apply filter to matching conversations so it catches the ones already in your inbox. From then on every letter files itself.
If the mission is already over
It is very often not too late. Everything that was sent to you is still in your inbox, whatever has happened to the account it was sent from, and for most families that is the whole weekly correspondence.
What does disappear with the Church account is anything that existed only inside it. If that account is still open, export it now rather than later. If it has already closed, do not assume the letters are lost — ask the rest of the family, because the copies in their inboxes are just as good. There is more on the deadline and what goes with it in what happens to missionary emails after the mission ends.
The photographs
Photographs attached to the letters come out inside the same file, still attached to the message they arrived with — so they stay matched to the week they belong to. That is worth more than it sounds. Two thousand loose photographs with camera filenames are very hard to put back in order; a photograph sitting beside the letter that describes it needs no ordering at all.
Photographs shared by a link rather than attached — a Google Photos album, a Dropbox folder — are not in the export. The link is; the pictures are not. If your missionary has been sharing albums, save those separately while the links still work. There is more on that in organizing missionary photos.
When it goes wrong
No email from Google after a couple of days
Check the spam folder of the account you exported, and check Takeout itself — it lists your exports and their status, and the link is often sitting there ready while the notification went astray. A very large mailbox can genuinely take more than a day.
The download link has expired
Links last about a week and work only a handful of times. Nothing is lost; start a fresh export. Your mail has not moved.
The download keeps failing part-way
Use a computer rather than a phone, and use Chrome rather than Safari for anything over a couple of gigabytes. If it still fails, run the export again and choose a smaller file-size option so Google splits it into several pieces; several small downloads succeed where one large one does not.
“Deselect all” did not stay deselected
Takeout sometimes reverts if you navigate backwards through the steps. Scroll up and confirm only Mail is ticked before you create the export, or you will wait a day for a copy of your entire Google Photos library.
What to do with the file
Nothing, is the short answer. Leave the zip exactly as Google gave it to you. Do not unzip it, do not go looking for the mbox inside it, and do not try to open it — an mbox is built for mail programs rather than for reading, and there is no step here that asks you to read one.
If you have already unzipped it, that is fine too; the .mbox from inside works just as well. And if Google sent you several zips, hand over all of them together rather than picking one.