Gmail Liberates Recorded Chat Logs Via IMAP

Thursday, September 15, 2011 | 11:50 AM

Labels:

Enough of these goofy videos for Google Takeout. It’s time for an instructional screencast video instead.

This week, Gmail added support for downloading your recorded chat logs via IMAP. All of the entries that you can see in your Gmail chats label will now be delivered to your local email client if it is configured to use IMAP.

We have some information about how to set up and use IMAP for Gmail liberation on our dataliberation.org site, but since chat liberation has been requested by many users in the past (both on twitter and our moderator page), here is a screencast that demonstrates this new feature in use.



If you already use IMAP to synchronize your Gmail account to a local device, enabling this new chat log export is as simple as clicking on the “Show in IMAP” checkbox for Chats in the Labels tab of your Gmail settings.

9 comments:

HodofHod said...

I want my goofy videos back!!!

Poussah said...

Very good news! If only we could now IMPORT those chats into a new Gmail account… I've spent hours and hours of tinkering and scripting to migrate 5 years of Gmail into my Google Apps Account, now only the chats are missing…

dwinks616 said...

@Poussah You should be able to use Thunderbird with IMAP on both accounts, and simply copy the IMAP folder for Chats from one account to the other, now.

Poussah said...

No, the chats folder is read only, I tried it before posting.

dwinks616 said...

Well, that's entirely lame. I guess it's better than not being able to export them at all, but it's not all that useful. At the very least, you could make an "archived chats" folder, and copy them from the IMAP on the source to that new folder on the destination. I don't have my home PC handy or I'd try it myself, but I don't see why that wouldn't work.

Shazz said...

Hey, not sure if this is the place to say this, but I already use thunderbird for offline backup, and despite turning on the chat label IMAP thing on gmail, thunderbird's not downloading it. Anything i'm missing?

Anonymous said...

I can't stand Google's goofy videos.

Anyway, can you please also enable downloading chat logs with POP3, or maybe even just export chats and messages to another Gmail account.

I'm thinking of switching to a new Gmail account and I already downloaded my messages with POP3, but chats are still there. I'm not that familiar with IMAP.

BTW, can I disconnect IMAP from Gmail once my chats have been downloaded?

Daniel said...

There's a bug in the IMAP implentation on Gmail's end.

http://marc.info/?t=131662901400006&r=1&w=2

david0287 said...

Hi not sure where to post this but can someone re-liberate Google Latitude, they have all my geo data and I just want to see it on one map. Your dataliberation.org website is out of date in mentioning that you can export a date range as they've taken away this feature so to export kml for a year you need to do 365 exports for each day, 7 for a week etc. Lots of people commenting in the forums, its been this way for a few months but no Google replies. Please help liberate us! Thanks.

Post a Comment