Frequently Asked Questions

Currently, Gmail Backup supports only [a-zA-Z0-9] characters in your labels. If you have *,/,+,' or any non ASCII characters in your labels then Gmail Backup fails.

If you want a quick fix then rename your labels.

See //www.gmail-backup.com/error-getting-labels

Good luck!

Question details:

I have found your app on the gmail website, and I would like to ask, whether it can be used to access my gmail, then transfer all my mail to my google apps mail account (associated to my own domain).

Yes, you can. Read this post to get more details about how to do it.

Yes, the IMAP access is necessary to run GMail Backup. If you don't have the IMAP access, you will get the following message:

Error: IMAP: [ALERT] Your account is not enabled for IMAP use. Please visit your Gmail settings page and enable your account for IMAP access. (Failure)

You can see more at //www.gmail-backup.com/incremental-backup#comment-164

Question details:
Hello there.

- what happens if I delete (volountarily) some emails from my GMail account? I mean, will I still be retain a copy in my backup folder on my computer or will it rather be deleted to?
- which GMail "folders" get backed up? Just the inbox or also the sent items and the drafts?

Thanks so far,
Flavio.

First, even though you delete an email from your Gmail Account, the deleted email will be kept in your in your backup folder. When we backup your emails, we only download emails. We do not delete any emails from your local copy. On the other hand, we overwrite emails if you decide to backup from scratch or you backup the same interval you already backed up. For example, if Gmail changed something in some email (accidentally - deleted content of the email but kept its record ("name - ID") in Gmail, the program would download an empty email and overwritten the correct one in the local copy.

Second, the program backup "All mails" folder. According to our experience, it should contain all sent, received, and draft emails.

Question details:
First off, good work. Looks nice.

My main question is this:

Are labels, dates and "from" fields preserved? I am backing up from
one gmail account and moving to another with your software.

Thanks!

Jason

All these fields are preserved. Labels are stored in the backup directory in the labels.txt file, so you can manually edit them. Dates and From fields are part of the message stored in the .eml file.

Question details:
Hi.

I just discovered your Gmail backup/migration utility and it looks useful.

However, I want to use it for a Google Apps Gmail account, bu there is no documentation on how to do this.

Could you please add a few lines to your "Documentation" page to explain how to do this? Some postings in your forum mentioned that people are doing this, but I don't see how.

To clarify, Google Apps mail is when I use Gmail as the mail server but the mail accounts and addresses are attached to my own domain. The account works exactly like any Gmail account, but the domain name is not gmail.com, but something else, and the e-mail address will be, for
example, myalias@mydomain.com

I hope that your utility can do this.

Thank you.

Regards,

Brad

The migration is simple. You have to just download (backup) all emails from your gmail account. And later to restore them to different account (Google Apps).

To download your emails, you probably use email myalias@gmail.com. To upload them to Google Apps, use myalias@mydomain.com email.

Do not forget to use appropriate passwords ;-)

Good luck!

Question details:

My outbound firewall picked up an attempt to connect to 77.78.110.132, which resolves to gmail-backup.com. Why is this software doing this? This attempt wasn't made when the app started (indicating that it's checking for updates) rather when I clicked the Backup button.

The application checks for updates. It downloads the //www.gmail-backup.com/files/version.txt file, which contains following information: last revision (SVN), last revision (version number), URI for download of new version. For downloading the file the standard Python library urllib2 is used. You can check the yesterday access log of HTTP server which I made public here.

The reason why it checks the new version after the start of backup is that we share a lot of lines of code between command-line version and GUI version and we want to check new available version on one place.

You can find more details at //www.gmail-backup.com/why-does-app-connect-home.

To be able to install Gmail Backup properly, you have to run the installation program as administrator. Download the EXE file, right click on, run ti as administrator.

Thanks to //www.gmail-backup.com/gmail-backup-0-101#comment-134 and //www.gmail-backup.com/gmail-backup-0-101#comment-138.

We are sorry but Proxy is not supported currently. It is not possible to use our tool while it is behind a proxy.

If you are behind a proxy server, the program cannot connect to Google account - (Error: (10060, 'Operation timed out')).

Yes, of course. GMail Backup stores the backup of emails in standard EML files which can be open with your e-mail client (MS Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird) and the program displays attachments as in "normal" emails.

For example, when I use Gmail's "All Mail" view, I see that I have 28,537 emails. However, Gmail Backup produced 54,662 .eml files when I did a full backup. I'm not sure why these 2 numbers aren't the same.

These two numbers are not equal because GMail counts conversations, but one conversation can contain many emails (.eml files).

Thanks to //www.gmail-backup.com/count-gmails-all-mail-view-count-full-gmail-....