How to Export Gmail Emails for Court (Google Takeout)

How to export the emails

What is in the zip

Inside is a folder named Takeout, then Mail, with one file per label you chose, such as Sent.mbox. An MBOX file is a plain container that holds every email one after another, each with its full headers: who sent it, who received it, the date, and the Message-ID that identifies it.

The file is large mainly because of attachments. Every attached photo and PDF is stored inside it as encoded text, which is why a few hundred emails can come to more than 100 MB.

Why it looks unreadable

Open an MBOX file in a text editor and most of it is not readable. That is normal, and nothing is damaged:

• Each email is usually stored twice, once as plain text and once as HTML.
• Lines end in = and letters appear as codes such as =E2=80=99. That is an encoding called quoted-printable; =E2=80=99 is an apostrophe.
• Long blocks of letters and digits are attachments, or the email text itself, in base64.
• A reply contains a copy of the email it answers, so the same words appear many times across a conversation.

To read it properly you would normally import the file into a mail program such as Thunderbird. Google describes the export in its Takeout help page.

Things to check before relying on it

• Sent mail is separate. If you export only the person’s label, you may get their emails and few of your replies. Including Sent fixes that.
• The same email can appear under more than one label. It is one email, not two.
• Dates in the headers carry a time zone. State the time zone when you quote a time.
• Keep the zip exactly as downloaded, and work on a copy. The untouched file is what shows nothing was altered.

Reading it with Verity

Verity reads the Takeout zip as it is; you do not need to unzip it or install a mail program. Drop it on the upload box and it lists the people in the mailbox, with the ones you write back and forth with first. Pick one and that correspondence is analyzed as a conversation.

Each email is reduced to what its sender actually wrote: quoted earlier emails, forwarded content and signatures are left out, and attachments are ignored. Emails you sent to several people at once are not included. Everything is read in your browser; the mailbox is not uploaded.

Email is often only part of the picture. For texts and chat apps, the export steps for each app are here.

This is general information, not legal advice. Verity is not a law firm, and requirements for authenticating a digital record vary by court — talk to an attorney about what your case specifically needs.