[rzendacott]

I'm very impressed with the number of products and services supported so far. It has everything from bookmarks to location history. It even lets you choose the format for some products, and Drive in particular has some nice options. I'm glad to see Google opening this tool up.

[thomasahle]

Agreed. Say what you want about Google, but I can't think of many, although they might be hotter, start ups that provide an equivalent service.

[jonursenbach]

Them allowing you to download your data isn't anything new.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front

[chmars]

For Gmail, it is new. Until recently, 'download' was only possible through IMAP and POP3 – and could therefore take days or even weeks due to throttling.

[davidgerard]

And Google's shitty, shitty, broken IMAP implementation.

Most of the dev work on offlineimap is to cope with GMail's weird ideas on what constitutes functional IMAP.

https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap

[blueskin_]

Ah, don't remind me.

In an old job, they used gmail for email, so most of the company used Thunderbird. This worked fine for most of them, but sysadmins got so much email (mostly alerts) that google's crappy IMAP implementation kept breaking so the clients would be constantly syncing, and folder operations such as moving stuff would often take multiple minutes.

My cheap VPS I run my own email on vastly outperforms gmail's IMAP.

[f_salmon]

Plot twist:

For NSA too.

[blowski]

Seriously, please keep the NSA comments to NSA articles. I know the NSA issue is important, but yammering on about it in every article is the same as a Bible-bashing Christian raising the topic of Jesus in every single conversation.

And I am Christian, and I do think the NSA issue is important.

[psbp]

I had a moment of paranoia a few months back where I thought it was concerted attempt to trivialize the issue, but then I realized it's just a way to get cheap laughs/upvotes.

[blueskin_]

Or it's a way to keep it on people's minds - that isn't mutually exclusive with having a few laughs, I guess I can see that more easily than others coming from a nation with a long history of self-deprecating and dark humour, but it's by no means a unique phenomenon.

[fnordfnordfnord]

It's still an improvement; before, the NSA could, and we couldn't.