Saving Gmail Emails Into Parsable Format

Question

I want to do some analysis on the emails I have sent and received in Gmail to compare it to other forms of communication. I am interested in things like average or median email length or the number of emails in a conversation.

I am trying to figure out the best way to get my emails from Gmail into a parsable format (e.g. a plain text format or ideally XML, but that is a reach) so that I can write a script to parse them. So far I am stumped. I assume it would begin with getting a desktop email client and downloading them with IMAP, but even then I am not sure how I would go about actually getting them into a parsable file.

Answer 1

If you Google "Gmail backup" you'll find a host of applications that will download your Gamil.

I downloaded the open source program Gmail Backup from https://code.google.com/p/gmail-backup-com/ and give it a try. It downloaded my Gmail, each email as the original source into its own file. All emails seem to be sorted into year/month folders.

You should be able to scan through the backup folder (and the year/month sub folders), loading in the original text of each of your emails.

Good luck.