I used Google Apps to host mail for this domain for a while, and wanted to close down the account since I don't use it anymore. Before I did that I wanted to move all the data onto my server. Transferring the emails was fairly straightforward using POP3, but I couldn't find a way to download the Google Talk logs. Gmail handles the logs as emails, but they aren't accessible using either POP3 or IMAP.

I therefore wrote a Python script which downloads the logs via the web interface. On Jeremy's suggestion I used BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML this time, which worked very well. The script works with both Google Apps and normal Gmail, although my account got locked twice while trying to download the 3500 logs in my account.