Summary
Details for set up of Physics Student Services shared email export.
Environment
Physics SSO Computers & Email Accounts
Overview
The Physics Student Services office has a shared inbox used for recruitment & communication with students. This email was over the 16GB limit imposed by the Google Storage Project.
All email previous to 4/1/24 have been exported using Google Takeout. This export file currently lives in Tammy Kennedy's dropbox. She has shared the file out with all SSO employees and they have downloaded it locally to their documents folder. Each staff member (Cory Steiner, Chelsea Raupp, Sarah Bargardi) has downloaded the Mbox file locally so they can be able to search past emails for references. We followed the Import Mbox Files Into Thunderbird for the process.
After the export, Tammy went through and deleted 6GB worth of emails from their GMail inbox. They did not have any data in drive, photos or anywhere else - this was soley an email account.
Setting up ongoing future exports
The email account will most likely need to be exported on a year basis to remain under the 16GB limit. When the email account fills back up the next export should only have to be for emails after 4/1/24. The initial export file was about 10GB in size so going forward it will be important to do incremental exports based on dates. This will also make it where the archived inbox does not have duplicates.
For future exports:
- Start by creating a label to use for your export. Something like Emails 4/1/24 - Current date would work.
- Use the before and after date filters in GMail to filter out all emails for a certain date range to be exported
- For example, I was doing the export in January of 2025, I would filter using "after:YYYY/MM/DD before:YYYY/MM/DD". The filter for this mostly works but will probably contain some wonky entries.
- Apply the new label to all filtered emails.
- When doing the Takeout export, only choose the label you just created to export. That will only export those emails and will not include previous emails from the last export.
- Run the take out export & download it. Import it according to the Import Mbox Files Into Thunderbird but create a new local folder for the most recent emails to be contained. This will avoid duplicates but also avoid loss of old emails because the first export will remain intact (keep in mind, very very old emails were deleted in the GMail inbox to get under the limit, those old emails only live in the Thunderbird archive now)
External resources
Import Mbox Files Into Thunderbird
Getting Started With Google Takeout