thunderbird
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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DeGoogle Yourself
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Google has a thing called "Takeout" that allows you to download all your data.
My understanding is you need to export per folder if you want to keep things organized.
Look into the vault API or the GAM tool
I think when you export your Google account data you have options on how it will split your Gmail across mbox files, and I think you can pick an option to split it by labels/folders.
This is probably not ideal. But we migrated from Google workspace to outlook. The outlook clients downloaded all gmail then I archived everything to a .ost file which is an offline storage container for all email.
If you need it, it's searchable within the mail client. I've not yet attempted viewing in Thunderbird though.
offlineimap and a few others do this. You don't need to search for a Google specific tool but the tags might not map that well to folders, though if you treat them as folders it's certainly imported. These tools are designed to take your (full or partial) mailbox on the go so you can work offline, hence they support incremental bidirectional syncing. Tools like offlineimap see quite some use so they should work as expected.
Takeout dot Google dot com
I am using Thunderbird. You can drag and drop thr folders to another account like that.