Knowledge base
Take your mail with you
One download with everything in it: every message and attachment in a format another mail app can open, plus your contacts, labels, rules, templates and calendar.
Not yet
Nothing exports today: the only things that leave through the product are one attachment at a time and your own encryption key, and what an archive can carry is a rebuild rather than the original bytes.
Details
- Not shipped. What leaves today is one attachment at a time, and your own private key from Settings → Encryption. There is no route, no command and no screen that produces an archive of a mailbox.
- What comes out will be a rebuild, and that is a property of how mail is kept here rather than a corner cut on the way out. A message is parsed once and the original bytes are never retained, so an archive can carry the text, the HTML, the attachments, the addresses, the dates and the headers a conversation is threaded on, and it cannot carry the DKIM signature or the exact part boundaries. A file claiming to be the message as it arrived would be a file nobody could verify as one, so the archive will say what it is.
- A mailbox is not one table to dump. Message bodies are objects in storage, the folder and label graph is a small database beside them, and contacts, rules, templates, calendar events, notes and settings each sit in their own table, so an export is a walk across three stores and every shard a mailbox is spread over, rather than a query. The delete path already walks exactly that, in the other direction, which is where the shape comes from.
- An end-to-end encrypted message can only come out the way it went in. The plaintext exists in the browser that opened it and nowhere else, so an archive carries the ciphertext and the key stays yours, which means everything cannot quietly mean everything readable. The archive names which messages came out sealed rather than leaving you to find out later.
- The list it has to cover, so that nothing is left behind quietly: messages and their attachments, the folders and labels they sit in, contacts, rules, templates and their published versions, calendar events and their attendees, thread notes, signatures and settings, and the public half of your keys. Anything that cannot be included is named in the archive instead of being omitted.
- A file you deleted leaves a marker rather than vanishing, so the index still knows the name of something whose bytes are gone. An export has to honour that and list it as deleted: an archive that promised a file it cannot produce is worse than one that is plain about the gap.