I spent quite a lot of time today tryin to clean up and backup some of my old chat logs from gmail. I wanted to delete the chat logs from my gmail account but also wanted their backup. IMAP/POP only works with emails and not chat logs. And with hundreds of chats in my mailbox, thought of forwarding each chat log manually was dreadful.
The official gmailblog forums says no way to bulk forward chat logs. Looked around for options(greasemonkey, etc) but no luck.
But Finally found a way out.
Check out http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/. It allows to log in to ur gmail and export selected folders and mails and EVEN chat logs.
Steps
- Create Gmail folder for chat messages and add a gmail filter to copy all message logs in that gmail folder
- Setup python.
- Setup mechanize( use easy-install)
- Setup libgmail
- Run archive.py
and Voila!!!..all mails/chat are exported in .mbox for backup…Sweettttt..:)
Hello sir,
I’m not a programmer but I have a good enough knowledge of programming. I followed all the steps you mentioned above and got everything up and running, logged into Gmail fine etc. But I don’t see the archive.py file. I downloaded the latest libgmail package from sourceforge but there was no such file as archive.py in it.
I Googled for it and found the old archive.py file which failed to run properly and did not let me log in. Is there anything you can suggest? This seems to be the only way to export the chat logs.
Thanks.
Mayur,
archive.py is packaged in libgmail-docs. You can download it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/libgmail/files/libgmail-docs/0.3/libgmail-docs_0.3.zip/download
- Bhupinder Sidana
Thanks for the quick reply. I must have missed that earlier. But it still does not let me log in.
I get the error: Login failed. (Wrong username/password?)