Add attachments

[maelp]

This is really cool! Would there be a way to add an option to also download attachments in a folder (with possible de-dup using sha256 to save space?) this would turn it in a full backup solution

[marcboeker]

Thanks! The idea behind gmail-to-sqlite was more of an analytical approach, like fetching all messages and then using specific messages as a training corpus for an AI model or running some analytics on it. If you want to use it as a backup solution, I would suggest using Google Takeout or something else that makes importing messages in the event of data loss much easier. But if you want to add attachment downloading, feel free to fork it. The messages returned from the Gmail service do contain attachment IDs, which can be retrieved with the users.messages.attachments.get call. I'll keep this open in the event we add this later.

[maelp]

Yes, but Takeout is a "one-time" thing, I'd rather do it continuously (so that if for some reason Google decides to block you from your account and you no longer have Takeout, you had your own backup first)

Indeed, I think it would be a good addition as an option if it's not too complex to do, I don't have the bandwidth to do it just now, but if someone is interested, I'll be happy to test it haha

[marcboeker]

What about using something as https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap3 or any other IMAP based backup tool? I think this is much easier for restoring than having all messages in a SQLite DB.

[maelp]

Indeed it's nice too! I like the idea of having the sqlite as it makes it easy to do searches and indexing on top of the archive, but perhaps the "right" route would be offlineimap3 for the backup, and then using gmail-to-sqlite on top of the offlineimap3 backup? Do you think your tool could be updated to read mailbox dirs?

[marcboeker]

I think in the long term we could switch to import connectors that could read from GMail, IMAP, local mbox dirs. But it is not planned for the near future...until someone wants to contribute.