How to make a copy of all your Gmail emails before you delete them.

I use a spark as my OS X email client but my mail is hosted by Google. After about seven years I found that I reached Google’s free 15 GB email limit and I could not receive any more emails. I could have started all over again with a new Gmail account but I wanted to keep my existing Gmail address. I could have deleted some old emails but I wanted to keep a record of them all. What I did is I created a new gmail account to keep a record of my old emails before I deleted them. I copied all my emails to this account. Then I could delete all my emails and get some more room on my everyday Gmail account. Here’s how to do that.

1. Backup your old emails to a different account.

1. Create a new gmail account for your email archive. (e.g. waynesarchive2020@gmail.com)
2. Go to your regular gmail account, click on the settings cog, click on ‘All settings’, click on and in settings turn on ‘Forwarding and PP/IMAP’ and then enable POP download. This will allow you to down all your emails from your regular gmail account.

3. Now you need to downgrade the google security on your account. In your regualr gmail account Enable less-secure Apps for that account. You can do that here: https://www.google.com/settings/security/lesssecureapps

4. Then go here: https://accounts.google.com/b/0/DisplayUnlockCaptcha

5. Now go to your new archive email account, and go to ‘Settings’ then ‘Accounts’ then go to ‘Check mail from other accounts’ and enter the details from your normal email account.

This will download the emails from you gmail account into the new gmail account.

These are the settings that you need to enter into the window when prompted. The POP server needs changing from the default to pop.gmail.com and the Port is 995 and turn on SSL. The username is your full email address.

Now wait a few days for them all to upload. Check that all the emails have been transferred across.

2. Delete your old emails.

Then you can delete emails from your everyday email account, knowing they have been archived. I suggest you use the search to delete your oldest emails.

e.g. Entering “before:2020/01/01” in your gmail search bar will allow you to select all teh emails before a certain date and delete them.

I deleted all the emails that were older than 2 years old.

If I want to access those old emails again I can just log into the second Gmail account and access them from there.