As you hopefully know if you’re reading this, we’ve just embarked on the joy that is self-employment and one of the things we needed to take care of was email for refactr.com. We decided to go with GMail because, well, it rocks. It’s the best web based email around. But here’s where the data thievery comes in, I had an existing GMail account that I’ve been using for my personal email for some time. I’ve got a bunch of emails stored up in this account and I don’t want to lose them, but keeping up with one email account is hard enough, so trying to manage two has become downright nightmarish. Now I’d like to just export all my mail from my older account and import it into my fancy new Google managed refactr.com account, but alas Google has stolen my data. They’ll happily allow me to configure POP in my older gmail.com account, but for some reason in the managed account, I don’t have the option of downloading messages via POP so I cannot get at my mail. It annoys me that they won’t give me easy access to my data. I shouldn’t even have to bother with POP either, I should be able to export the mail as XML or any other number of formats so that I can import it anywhere.

At Refactr, we develop the software, but believe that your data is yours and you should always have easy access to what belongs to you.