Backing up Gmail with Thunderbird to mbox, how?

[Nicholas]

What I've done for now is login to Gmail with Alpine, which allows me to 
export e-mails by appending to a file.  It's somewhat awkward, but, on 
the plus side, works.  Creates a mbox file which can be read in by 
Alpine or even mailutils.

Why mailutils cannot parse the mbox file created from Thunderbird is one 
for the ages.


-Nick


On 2023-11-27 21:03, Nicholas wrote:
> I would expect this to be well documented and fairly straightforward.  
> I'm using the plugin:
>
> https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools-ng/ 
>
>
> and just clicking a folder to export to an mbox file.  It's just not 
> readable with mailutils.  Downloading a sample mbox works fine.  So 
> that implies that the "mail" command is working at least well enough 
> to read an arbitrary mbox file.  Perhaps this Thunderbird file is odd 
> in some way?  That would seem unusual, as Thunderbird is quite 
> mainstream, Gmail is very mainstream, and this is a widely used backup 
> tool.  So that suggests that I'm not exporting "correctly" somehow.  
> But what specifically can be done differently is a mystery.
>
> Has anyone had success, or failure, with backing up Gmail?  Did you 
> use Thunderbird, or some other tool?  Any specific experience with 
> this export tool?
>
>
>
> see also:
>
> https://askubuntu.com/q/1494163/847449
>
>
>
>
> thanks,
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>