14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that Google's Data Liberation Front is not done with Gmail and its related products. After 'liberating' Google Voice, the team found another target and has now liberated chat logs in Gmail as well. Granted, it's not a big a move as Google Voice, but it's another small step towards a much more open web.
The way Google went about liberating Gmail chats is interesting, it's pretty much a hack, but an elegant and effective one. Users will be able to export chat logs via IMAP just like they can any email message they send or receive in Gmail.
This way, they'll be able to get access to their chat logs via any email client and, from there, save them in any form they want.
"This week, Gmail added support for downloading your recorded chat logs via IMAP," Daniel Benson, Data Liberator at Google, wrote.
"All of the entries that you can see in your Gmail chats label will now be delivered to your local email client if it is configured to use IMAP," he added.
"We have some information about how to set up and use IMAP for Gmail liberation on our dataliberation.org site, but since chat liberation has been requested by many users in the past (both on twitter and our moderator page), here is a screencast that demonstrates this new feature in use," he said pointing to the video below.
The video goes through the whole process of downloading Mozilla Thunderbird, a popular desktop email client, configuring it to sync with your Gmail account and then enabling IMAP sync for chat logs as well.
If you're already using Thunderbird, or any other email client, there is really only one step you need to take. Go the Mail settings section in Gmail, go to the Labels tab and check the box that says "Show in IMAP" next to the Chats label.