I recently had to prepare a company's Gmail emails for an NLP training project where we needed clean text files instead of mailbox archives. My first thought was to export everything as MBOX using Google Takeout and parse it with Python, but that quickly became messy. Cleaning MIME content, HTML formatting, attachments, and email headers took much more effort than expected before the data was actually usable for training.

In the end, I switched to BitRecover Gmail to TXT Converter. It let me export Gmail emails directly into plain text with filters for specific folders and date ranges, preserved the email content properly, and even handled multiple Gmail accounts in one go. That saved a lot of preprocessing time, so we could focus on preparing the dataset instead of cleaning email files.