This post is part of my series, 12 Years of Gmail, taking a look at the data Google has accumulated on me over the past 12 years of using various Google services and documenting the learning experience developing an open source Python project (Takeout Inspector) to analyze that data.

I have been slowly migrating off of a Gmail email address for a couple of months now - I established this domain, selected an email provider, set up SPF, DMARC, etc. and finally created myself a new email address. I updated the address in all of the obvious places, but still found myself using Gmail frequently to keep up. At some point I realized that the only way to finish the migration would be to do something with all the email I had hoarded away in Gmail.

When I made the transition to Gmail (from a mail server in my basement) back in 2004, I found some tool that pulled all my existing email in to Gmail using POP. So, I thought to myself in 2016, I'll just do that again! I fired up Thunderbird, set up Gmail POP access and started downloading. At some point, thousands of emails in, I decided …

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