Monthly Archives: October 2009

Liberating Google Docs

A couple weeks ago, the Google Docs team launched a multi-file uploader to make it much easier for you to put files into the cloud. Today we're launching a new feature to make it much easier to get your content out: "Convert, Zip and Download."

Select one or more files and then click on "Export" from the "More Actions" menu. Next, pick the format (e.g. PDF, Microsoft Word, etc) you want for your exported files. Finally, click "Continue" and we'll give you a nice zip file to download that has all your content.

For now, you can "export" up to 500 MB of content in a single zip file, which is over 20,000 typical files. Sometimes it takes us a few minutes to export really large amounts of files, so instead of making you wait, we added an "Email when ready" option. We'll send you a link when the zip file is ready.



Give it features a whirl and let us know what you think.

Posted by Luke Blanshard and JJ Lueck, The Data Liberation Front

Source: Data Liberation


Liberate your Gmail with IMAP and Thunderbird

When we asked you what services you'd like to see liberated, Gmail came up several times. I have good news! Some of those requests are already available. Probably the best way to get your mail out of Gmail is with IMAP. A great place to start learning about IMAP is in the Gmail Help Center at

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=75725.

There are many IMAP clients available, but I like Thunderbird. It has the added bonus of being open source. Once you connect it to your Gmail account there are a lot of things you can do.

Andy asked to be able to
"Export Gmail email to mbox file. Even better if you can choose to just export messages with a given label, or those matching a search."

We don't have a great answer for the search part of your question, but with thunderbird, exporting a label is easy. Just right-click the folder (labels appear as folders in Thunderbird) and choose 'Import/Export' > 'Export folder.' By default Thunderbird exports messages as .mbox files.


Ludovic PIOT asked:
"We need to be able to import any ThunderBird or Apple Mail archived e-mails into our GMail account."

Once you have the data in Thunderbird, you can drag and drop folders straight onto the [Gmail] folder. Thunderbird will create a new label for you and populate it with the messages from the folder you dragged over.

Jorijn Smit asked for
"The ability to merge gmail accounts into one. I have a couple of addresses and it would be great if all these boxes could be merged. Not as in one accounts that checks mail of the other but full intergration of all apps."

For your Gmail messages you can connect both accounts to Thunderbird and drag and drop the messages from one account to the other. Remember to bring your filters to your new account too -- you can learn more about that at http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-in-labs-filter-importexport.html.

There are lots of other ways to get at your Gmail data with an IMAP client like Thunderbird. Feel free to post your experiences and further questions as comments.

Daniel - First Colonel in the Data Liberation Front

Source: Data Liberation


Orkut Friends Export Bug Fixed

Yesterday, in the process of adding additional security measures to Orkut Friends Export, we inadvertently introduced a bug that prevented users from exporting their contacts (instead, they were redirected to their Orkut home page). This bug was fixed this morning before 11AM CDT and users can once again export their contacts by going to their Friends page and clicking on the export button. I'd like to apologize for any inconvenience that this might have caused for Orkut users.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to reiterate our commitment to our users: You should be able to control the data you store in any of Google's products, and we will continue to work to make it easier for you to move your data in and out of our products. If, in the future, you encounter any issues with import or export from Google products, please don't hesitate to let us know. You can reach us on Twitter at @dataliberation.


Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, Data Liberation Front

Source: Data Liberation