How to download all your Gmail and keep it on your Mac
There are three common ways to get a copy of every email from Gmail onto a Mac. They give you very different things: a file, a mail app's copy, or an archive you can search and keep up to date.
Option 1: Google Takeout
Google Takeout is Google's own export, free with every Google account.
- Go to takeout.google.com and choose Deselect all.
- Tick Mail. You can choose all mail or particular labels.
- Choose how to receive it (a download link by email, or a copy in Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or Box), the file type (zip is easiest) and the largest file size. Choose 50 GB to avoid the export being split into several files.
- Wait for Google's email. It can take minutes or days; most people get it the same day.
- Download within about 7 days, before the link expires. Each archive can be downloaded 5 times.
What you get: a zip file with your mail in one large mbox file. That is a standard format that many email apps can open, but a Mac cannot open it by itself, and it does not update: mail that arrives tomorrow is not in it. Takeout can repeat the export every 2 months for a year.
Takeout details from Google's help pages, checked on 28 October 2026. If you choose Drive as the destination, the export counts towards your Google storage.
Option 2: Apple Mail
Add your Gmail account to Apple Mail and it downloads your mail to keep a local copy. To make a file you can keep, select a mailbox and choose Mailbox, Export Mailbox. Mail saves it as an mbox package.
What you get: a working copy while the mail is still in Gmail. Apple Mail follows the server, so when you delete old mail from Gmail it goes from your Mac too. Exports are one-off files, one mailbox at a time, and a large Gmail account can be slow to download completely.
Option 3: Stow
Stow is a private email archive for Mac. It brings years of old email down from the cloud into an encrypted, searchable archive on your computer, and keeps it up to date in the background.
- Everything, exactly. Every email and attachment, kept exactly as it arrived and checked byte for byte when it is saved.
- Stays when Gmail forgets. Mail you delete from Gmail stays in Stow. Stow only reads your mailbox and does not change it.
- Search in seconds. Across every account, offline, including the text inside PDFs and Word documents.
- Encrypted on your Mac. No Stow servers: your mail goes from Google to your Mac and nowhere else.
- Not locked in. Export everything as standard mbox files at any time, or save single emails as .eml files.
Stow also works with Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com, so several accounts live in one archive. It is €30 once, with a 14-day free trial, for Macs with Apple silicon.
Which should you choose?
- Leaving Google for good, and need everything (Drive, Photos, Calendar as well as mail): use Takeout.
- Just want mail on your Mac while it is still in Gmail: Apple Mail is fine.
- Want to free up Gmail space but keep every email, searchable, for years: use Stow, then delete old mail from Gmail with Stow's step-by-step instructions. See Gmail storage full.
Stow is coming soon. Join the waitlist and we will email you once, the day it launches.