How to download all the raw emails using some email client?

As mentioned in the comments, most of the popular email clients already do that.

Although I wouldn't recommend Outlook, as it does deform the headers a bit – Thunderbird works better in that regard. (You can even drag & drop a message from Thunderbird to your desktop, and have it stored as a regular file.)

On Linux you could also use Claws, mutt, OfflineIMAP, or any of the dozens of IMAP clients.

user1686

Posted 2016-04-09T09:20:27.163

Reputation: 283 655

Can I drag them all and have them saved as plaintext? – Samuel Shifterovich – 2016-04-09T11:33:19.813

Probably? Never tried. The internal storage format that Thunderbird uses is also plaintext (Maildir in latest version, mbox in earlier ones). – user1686 – 2016-04-09T11:34:30.170

Okay. I only worked with exporting into those backup formats so far. – Samuel Shifterovich – 2016-04-09T11:35:22.923

Well, drag & drop doesn't work, but "Save as" and choosing the destination will save it in .eml, which is plaintext (obviously, since Thunderbird stores them in plaintext) – Samuel Shifterovich – 2016-04-09T11:48:54.710

There's nothing "obvious" in the latter part. For all you know, the mail client could store the messages in a database (e.g. Outlook uses .pst, Geary uses sqlite) and extract the plaintext on demand. I only mentioned the plaintext thing because you might have wanted to access the stored mails directly, from within Thunderbird's profile folder. – user1686 – 2016-04-09T11:51:33.740

Right, I just, well, you said "The internal storage format that Thunderbird uses is also plaintext " – Samuel Shifterovich – 2016-04-09T11:54:37.600

@grawity, I see that thunderbird collapses double spaces in your Subject header when sending mails. Also, when reading mails it auto capitalizes the word re: and adds a space after it. Do you know of any good raw email clients that does not automatically transform my mails? – Pacerier – 2017-12-09T17:48:34.297

.. from where are you downloading them? And what is raw format? – Raystafarian – 2016-04-09T09:23:27.760

Raw format is like the original email with all the headers, etc. From where? - does it matter? – Samuel Shifterovich – 2016-04-09T09:27:16.073

They are already saved in "raw format". You need to ask your email client to display all headers. For example, Displaying Full Message Headers in Microsoft Outlook (Windows) and How to View Complete Message Headers in Mozilla Thunderbird

– DavidPostill – 2016-04-09T10:17:28.870

How to download all the raw emails using some email client?

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