What is gmvault?

Gmvault is a command-line tool for backing up and restoring a Gmail account. It connects to your Gmail inbox, downloads all your emails, and saves them to a folder on your computer. If you ever need to move your mail to a different Gmail account or recover from an account problem, you can use the same tool to push those saved emails back up. The tool runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. On Windows there is a shell launcher included. On other platforms you run it directly from the command line. Installation is available as a prebuilt download from the project website, as a pip install, or from the source code on GitHub. Authentication uses OAuth, which means you authorize the app through Google's standard login flow rather than storing your password in plain text. The token gets saved locally after the first login so you do not have to authenticate again each time. A password-based option also exists for quick testing but the README recommends OAuth as the safer choice. Running a full backup is one command: gmvault sync followed by your Gmail address. An incremental sync option downloads only the emails added or changed since the last run. Backed-up mail is stored in a local directory called gmvault-db by default, with an option to choose a different location. Restoring sends the contents of that directory to any Gmail account you specify, and a resume option lets you pick up where you left off if a previous restore was interrupted. The project is open source under the GNU AGPL 3.0 license.