GoogleGroup Exporter - Unlock your mailing list

GoogleGroup Exporter is an extensible tool for retrieving and analysing your mailing list content.

Features

• Dump all your messages into a mbox file so you can explore the content using email clients.
• Export all your topics with title, author, date and url to a csv file so you can easily explore it on a spreadsheet.
• Support extraction of private groups using your browser's cookies.
• Download all content in parallel.
• Transparently cache all requests so you can inexpensively retry or process the content in different ways.
• Offers an easy extension API so you write your own scripts.

Installation and Usage

Install Python 3.5 or greater and then simply:

pip install googlegroupexporter

Then execute the program:

ggexport my-public-group

By default, ggexport will generate a my-public-group.mbox file with all the messages. Then you can open it with you preferred email client.

Exporting a Private Group

To export a private group you need to inform your cookie header string to ggexport.

To retrieve the cookie header on Google Chrome:

1. Login into you Google Account;

2. Visit your GoogleGroup page, for example:

   https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/my-private-group
   

3. Then inspect the page with Chrome's Developer Tool;

4. Go to Network;

5. Select a request to the domain groups.google.com;

6. Select Headers;

7. Search for Request Headers;

8. Look for the Cookie key;

9. Copy the cookie header value string;

Then run:

ggexport my-private-group --cookies "COOKIE-HEADER-STRING-COPIED-FROM-MY-BROWSER"

Listing your group topics

To create a csv listing all your group's topics along with their urls, authors, dates and number of messages, run:

ggexport my-public-group --mode csv

How to contribute

Fork this repository, checkout your fork, then:

python -m venv .gge
source .gge/bin/activate
python setup.py develop

Change what you want, then run the tests:

python setup.py test

To run your developed code you can use the command ggexport or run the module python -m googlegroupexporter.

When everything works, submit a pull request.

License

MIT License