Open a Gmail .mbox from Google Takeout

What Google Takeout gives you

When you export Gmail with Google Takeout, the mail arrives as one or more ZIP (or .tgz) downloads. Inside, under Takeout/Mail, is usually a single file called something like All mail Including Spam and Trash.mbox. That one file holds every email in the account, one after another, with the attachments inside them. For a mailbox kept for years it is often several gigabytes, which is why many viewers either refuse it or ask you to upload it.

Open it here

1. Unzip the Takeout download first: double-click it on a Mac, or right-click and choose Extract All on Windows. If you drop the ZIP itself, the page tells you which file to take out of it.
2. Drop the .mbox file on this page, or press Choose a file.
3. A bar shows the file being read. It is read a few megabytes at a time, so a big export doesn’t have to fit in your device’s memory. On a typical computer a gigabyte takes a few seconds.
4. The messages are listed with sender, subject and date. Click one to read it and save its attachments.

The first 10 messages can be read for free, so you can check the file is the right one. Browsing and searching every message is part of the one-time £6 unlock.

Gmail labels become folders

Gmail doesn’t have folders; it has labels, and one email can carry several. Takeout writes each message’s labels into a hidden header called X-Gmail-Labels. Mailunwrap reads it and puts each message in one folder: Sent, Drafts, Spam, Trash or Inbox when it has those labels, otherwise the first label you made yourself (such as Receipts or Work/Projects), otherwise Archived. Gmail’s own markers, such as Opened, Important and the Category tabs, are ignored. Once every message has been read, the folders appear beside the list and you can pick one.

Split it by label, or take it somewhere else

With the unlock, the whole mailbox (or one label) can be exported into a ZIP made on your device:

• Mail as .mbox: one .mbox per label, which suits importing into Thunderbird (with an mbox import add-on such as ImportExportTools NG) or Apple Mail (File, Import Mailboxes, then Files in mbox format). Smaller files per label are easier to import than one giant one.
• Mail as .eml files: one file per email, in a folder per label. Most mail programs open .eml files, and they’re easy to search on your computer.
• Mail as PDFs: a PDF of each email with its attachments beside it, for keeping records or handing to someone else.

Each export comes with a summary.csv listing every message, and any message that couldn’t be read is listed with the reason instead of stopping the export.

Why not upload it somewhere?

A whole Gmail account holds bank statements, password resets, medical letters and years of private conversation. Upload-based converters copy all of that to someone else’s server. Here the file is read by your own browser and never leaves your device, which is also why a multi-gigabyte file works: nothing has to travel over your connection.

If it won’t open

• Takeout split the export. Big exports come as several ZIPs. The .mbox is in one of them; it isn’t split across them.
• Very large accounts. Up to 250,000 messages are listed from one file. For more, export a few labels at a time from Takeout, which lets you choose which labels to include.
• A phone. Phones can open an .mbox too, but a big one is much quicker on a computer.