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 in 2024. This inbox is used extensively and will most likely need to be backed up and have messages deleted on a regular basis. Doing this on a yearly cadence will make it cleaner and easier to complete.
All emails are exported using Google Takeout before being deleted from the google inbox. As of 5/25 there are two backups - one for prior to 2024 and one from 2024-2025. Google Takeout exports a MBOX file. The file is stored in the Physics SSO Dropbox so others can download as needed. This file should continue to live as the raw data (and a backup) in case the downloaded versions become corrupt or get deleted. We followed the Import Mbox Files Into Thunderbird for the process.
Physics SSO does not have any data in drive, photos or anywhere else - this is 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 will only have to be for emails after the last export. 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:
Notes about the Google Takeout export:
- 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.
- Before starting the Takeout export, have the user log out of all google accounts. Then log into only the shared SSO inbox. This ensure Takeout uses the correct account and not the users personal account.
- 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. The user will get an email when it is available for download.
Notes about the Thunderbird import.
- Import each yearly MBOX file 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)
- To do the import:
- Download the new MBOX file into the users documents file.
- Right click in the Thunderbird side bar to create new folder.
- Right click on your new folder and choose Import/export NG
- Import the MBOX file
- Remind the user to leave the application running for a while so the emails get indexed and are searchable
External resources
Import Mbox Files Into Thunderbird
Getting Started With Google Takeout