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Since Gmail supports imap and pop3, one could simply use any proven email client to backup the emails. I don't think a special tool that or may not work is need
by laurent123456 10y ago
Since Gmail supports imap and pop3, one could simply use any proven email client to backup the emails. I don't think a special tool that or may not work is needed for this.
- cookiecaper 10y agoWhich "proven email client" do you recommend? There's an Import/Export extension for Thunderbird, one of the last standing desktop mail apps, but it's not good at handling huge, multi-thousand message exports. gmvault is purpose-built and quite simple. I've used it before with success. It backs up your whole mailbox in one command. Why should we fiddle with a desktop mail client?
- laurent123456 10y agoThunderbird works fine for me to handle several GB of emails (the mailbox archives that it generates are plain text and standard so there's no need to export them). For the command line there are also tools like `getmail`[0], with the added benefit that they work with any email provider. [0] http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/ http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/
- kitcar 10y agoFWIW I imported a 6GB .mbox file with Thunderbird last week, worked fine -
- cookiecaper 10y agoI stopped using Thunderbird because it was choking under my 20GB of mailboxes.
- pi-rat 10y agofetchmail, getmail and offlineimap are all "proven email clients" that work great for this.
- Twirrim 10y ago+1 on offlineimap. Those of us that may be a little strange in the head and prefer using mail clients like mutt will often use it to handle background imap syncing.
- theophrastus 10y agoI've successfully used getmail to back-up my gmail accounts for over ten years now. It's a classic case of a functional, if a bit crufty, solution blinding one to a potentially better solution, so i appreciate this (gmvault) heads-up. thank you.
- ekianjo 10y ago> Thunderbird, one of the last standing desktop mail apps How about clawsmail ? It's a pretty good client too, and still updated.
- favadi 10y agoI love claws mail, but have to switch to thunderbird because it doesn't work well in a 4K monito.
- cptskippy 10y agoTo my knowledge you can't run Thunderbird as a background service so you'll have to routinely run it. This can be a job scheduled to run in the background.
- andybak 10y agoGmail tags don't map cleanly on to IMAP folders. The abstraction is leaky especially for backup/restore.