Press Release
July 23, 2026 – Email backup was once an afterthought. This year that has changed. Google has deprecated two features that used to silently sync external email accounts in Gmail since the start of 2026, including the ability to automatically import mail from other providers and a related feature that used Gmail’s filtering and search on those accounts. With both gone, manual exports and backups have become the norm for a lot more users.
Google Workspace admins have had an even shorter time frame. Organizations faced a hard deadline in early February to download certain messages before they were permanently inaccessible under standard retention rules. Waiting wasn’t an option for IT teams that managed the process.
The MBOX Problem
Both instances direct users to the same tool: Google Takeout. It’s Google’s native export system, which gives you mail in MBOX format that you can easily open in clients such as Thunderbird or Apple Mail. Outlook is the exception. It can’t natively read MBOX, and Google doesn’t provide a direct way to go from its export tool to Outlook’s PST format.
This isn’t easy to do by hand either. Exports have to be run one account at a time and large mailboxes can take a very long stretch of time to process and there is no easy way to handle several accounts together. That workload quickly adds up for a company trying to preserve archives from multiple people before a deadline.
Google isn’t the target of a tool made for another migration DataVare’s MBOX to PST Converter was not made for Google. Its purpose was to allow mail transfer between desktop clients such as Thunderbird, Apple Mail and Eudora. However, since the output from Google Takeout is standard MBOX, the tool works equally well on files that originated in Gmail.
It batch converts MBOX files to PST without requiring Outlook or the original client to be installed and lets users select specific files rather than converting the entire folder at one time. Sender and recipient information, attachments, and other message attributes are preserved during the conversion. Designed for use on both Windows and Mac systems.
“We didn’t build this around Google’s changes, but the timing has worked out that way,” a DataVare spokesperson said.
Availability
Windows and Mac users can try the conversion process for free with a trial version of the software before they purchase a license. Corrupted MBOX files are not supported.
DataVare Software
DataVare Software develops email and data conversion tools for individuals and organizations migrating between formats and platforms.
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