Google Vault
Google Workspace's retention and eDiscovery tool. An administrator can hold, search and export the mail of accounts across an organisation — and the export is MBOX.
Vault is the administrative counterpart to Google Takeout. Where Takeout lets a person download their own data, Vault lets an organisation set retention rules, place legal holds, search across many accounts at once and export what it finds. It is part of Google Workspace, not of consumer Gmail accounts.
Mail exported from Vault arrives as MBOX, accompanied by metadata files that describe the export itself. The mailboxes open in any standard reader, which is what makes Vault exports workable outside Google — an important detail when the recipient is a lawyer or an external investigator with no access to the domain.
One difference from a Takeout export is worth knowing in advance: a Vault export does not carry Gmail labels. Anything you would normally filter by label has to be found by search, date or sender instead — which is exactly why exporting a chosen selection, rather than a whole label, is the workflow that fits this material.
Related terms
Google's official service for exporting your personal data, including Gmail. For email, it produces one or more MBOX files containing all your messages and their Gmail labels.
The legal process of identifying, preserving, reviewing and handing over electronic records — email above all. It is the reason most people ever need to cut a mailbox down to a specific set of messages.
A plain-text file format that stores multiple email messages concatenated together, each beginning with a "From " separator line. It is the format Google Takeout produces when you export your Gmail archive.