Downloading / backing up Gmail messages by date range

I currently use fetchmail to download my Gmail email via POP3 to my laptop, where I read it with a text-mode email client called sup. But for a couple of months back in 2009, I was in the middle of a cross-country move and temporarily switched to using the Gmail web UI. Then when I switched back to using fetchmail, it wasn’t able to read those two months’ worth of email, which remained missing until today.

To get back the missing messages, I first used the Gmail web UI to label those messages. I knew that I was missing email that had arrived between July 9, 2009 and Aug 29, 2009. So I did a search in Gmail for after:2009/7/9 before:8/29/2009. Then I clicked on the “select all” checkbox, and when Gmail asked me if I wanted to select all 1700 messages in the search results, I said yes. Then I tagged those messages with the “missing” label.

Back on the laptop, I installed mutt, another text-mode email client that I used for many years, and which has excellent IMAP support. I created a ~/.muttrc file that looked like this:

mbox_type=Maildir
set from = "myusername@gmail.com"
set realname = "My Name"
set imap_user = "myusername@gmail.com"
set imap_pass = "mypassword"
set folder = "imaps://imap.gmail.com:993"
set spoolfile = "+INBOX"
set postponed ="+[Gmail]/Drafts"
set trash = "imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Trash"

I created a maildir to store the missing messages:

maildirmake ~/Maildir/missing

Finally, I started mutt. It showed my Gmail inbox, so I told it to switch to the “missing” pseudo-folder by typing c=missing. I tagged all the messages in that folder using T., then saved them all to the newly created Maildir folder using ;s~/Maildir/missing. It took several minutes to download many megabytes of email. After that was done, I now had a fully-populated mail directory containing all the missing messages.