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OfflineIMAP: sync and backup tool for IMAP
- j0hnM1st 9y agoError: No available formula with the name "imapfw" :-(
- TobyGiacometti 9y agoI don't think imapfw is widely adopted yet, it seems to be work in progress so most people probably opt for the more stable predecessor OfflineIMAP.
- JetSpiegel 9y agoSee also the older but somewhat more reliably and faster isync AKA mbsync. http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html
- cannam 9y agoMy first thought was "older? really?" - but hosted at SourceForge, I guess it could be. I started using offlineimap in 2008, which feels like a long time ago but of course is a lot more recent than the first appearance of imap.
- uzoodoo 9y agoI used to use OfflineIMAP, and then tried mbsync, and it's much faster.
- orschiro 9y agoIf I use this, is the result different than from using Thunderbird?
- TobyGiacometti 9y agoOfflineIMAP is not a graphical email client. It is simply a tool with which you can either backup emails from your provider using IMAP or sync a local Maildir with your provider. The tool uses the Maildir email format. More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir
- badosu 9y agoWorks great with mutt!
- interfixus 9y agoThirteen years of thunderbirding - downloading all imap for local keeping, and with numerous migrations between servers - has not lost me a single email. In fact, I have all mail correspondance since the mid nineties - around a hundred thousand mails - neatly archived in Thunderbird folders. For what it's worth.
- walterbell 9y agoCan Thunderbird do full-text search, or do you use an external program to index the folders?
- interfixus 9y agoIt can. It's clunky, but it can.
- rcarmo 9y agoI have Thunderbird installed on an ODROID-U2 board solely for searching my email archives via VNC when I'm not at home. It works very well.
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 9y agoNot parent, but yes. TB can do both an index-accelerated search, or a full-scan search. Alternatively, since everything's downloaded locally as mboxes / maildirs, use grep / ag / ripgrep, etc.
- tambourine_man 9y agoSame here, only with many many clients, including Thunderbird. Oh, and POP
- interfixus 9y agoOh, and POP, yes, in them olden days of yore.
- tmalsburg2 9y ago
- consultutah 9y agoI need this and real full text search. Who will give me full text search? ;)
- dima55 9y agohttps://notmuchmail.org/ https://notmuchmail.org/ http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/
- jterk 9y ago+1 for mu (and mu4e)
- fusiongyro 9y agoAnother +1 for mu/mu4e. Been using it at work for three or four years. Having instant access to ~8 year old email is like a superpower.
- znpy 9y agoquestion: how is mu/mu4e at handling multiple email accounts?
- dima55 9y agoDelightful. There are several ways to deal with it. I do this: - For READING mail, my offlineimap knows about multiple accounts and puts them in different directories on disk - mu indexes the PARENT of all those directories, so as far as mu is concerned, there's a single mail store with ALL the mail. The m: filter can be used to select specific directories, which map to different accounts here - For SENDING mail, mu4e knows about multiple contexts that are detected based on rules you can set (for instance, when replying to email, it'll set the context to whichever account the mail I'm replying to was sent). Or one can set the context explicitly with the ';' binding. Works quite well
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- akie 9y agoI've successfully used imapsync (https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync and https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ https://imapsync.lamiral.info/) in the past. It's been around for years, has tons of options, and has proven very stable, and is still maintained.
- TobyGiacometti 9y agoWhat is the difference between the GitHub version and the paid version on the website?
- Chmouel 9y agoBinaries it seems (for mac/win)
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoYup. Just used it last week to migrate my IMAP account to a new box. Used it years ago for a similar migration. Always works great.
- itsfatz 9y agoThis saved me at least 2 hours of awful fetchmail/getmail related work last month; Highly recommended.
- finnh 9y agofetchmail or getmail? I once used a very-slightly customized version of getmail (the Charles Cazabon program) in production to sync customers' GMail accounts into Salesforce.com, and it worked great (continues to work great, AFAIK).
- wfunction 9y agoDoes imapsync set INTERNALDATE correctly? I ask because naive IMAP uploading doesn't do this. (It's the date Gmail shows in the mailbox.)
- amirouche 9y ago
- avar 9y agoI use OfflineIMAP to fetch & emacs/mu+mu4e+exim to read+index/search+send my E-Mail. It works, and overall I'm happy with it. I used to use mbsync but when my employer migrated from Cyrus to Exchange IMAP I couldn't get mbsync to work with it, but OfflineIMAP worked just fine. Now they've migrated to GMail, which works fine with both, and even though OfflineIMAP is more flexible & easier to customize I'll probably switch back at some point. OfflineIMAP regularly pegs my CPU at >100% just downloading a few dozen E-Mails, whereas mbsync's CPU usage never went above 2-3%. When my laptop fan starts spinning it's usually OfflineIMAP in the background. So if you're looking for an IMAP->Maildir retriever or backup solution consider trying out mbsync first. It's a PAIN to switch between these programs, or even using the same data when switching between different servers (e.g. Cyrus -> Exchange). Inexplicably neither of them have some sort of reindexing mode where they can take an existing Maildir and reconstruct their local database from local/remote Message-Id's. They both use & maintain an opaque local database. That's why I haven't simply gone back to mbsync.
- defanor 9y agoI'm in a situation similar to the one you were in (mu4e, Exchange IMAP at work), and mbsync (version 1.2) works for me. Not sure what Exchange version is there, and I had to configure it a bit both initially and after an MS Exchange update -- but just some basic settings, such as `SSLType STARTTLS`, setting CertificateFile manually, `AuthMechs LOGIN`.
- simplect 9y agoI like mu4e because it integrates with orgmode well. However, it is not the best client for managing Exchange meeting invites and plain text responses are not very readable in outlook. Were you able to solely rely on mu4e without using Outlook?
- defanor 9y agoYes, and I've actually never used Outlook with Exchange. But I'm only sending plain text responses, not trying to use any advanced features, and it works fine to receive and read meeting invites (just as messages). What goes wrong with plain text responses in Outlook, by the way?
- urda 9y agoSad to see: Python v3.4+ [STALLED] But looks like development is pretty active so, hopefully they finish making the jump to Python 3 soon!
- peterwwillis 9y agoBack when Fetchmail would segfault on certain spam messages, and a bug report to ESR went nowhere, I wrote my own mail fetcher in Perl. Then I extended it to IMAP, and later IMAPS, working around some bugs in some popular IMAP servers. I had it deliver mail to a local mda (so I could use Maildir and mda filters) and configurable to keep or delete mails from the remote server. I think it only supports one remote mailbox, however. https://github.com/psypete/public-bin/blob/public-bin/src/pop3download/pop3download-0.8.pl https://github.com/psypete/public-bin/blob/public-bin/src/po... (It's very old code that sucks, and not secure, fwiw)
- jwilk 9y agoI guess fetchmail is more stable now. I've never seen any crashes, and I've been using it against IMAP servers for at least a decade.
- dmd 9y agoFor backing up GMail, can anyone compare this to https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault ?
- degenerate 9y agoAlso, is there a similar tool to migrate from MSN/Yahoo to Gmail?
- chrisper 9y agoThere is. https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync
- joshstrange 9y agoOops, I just saw this after I post at the top level: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222691 I can't compare it but I have been using gmvault for quite a while and love it.
- joshstrange 9y agoFor those of you using GMail I'll repost a comment of mine [0] about gmvault [1]: I have been using this for years and it's great software. One tip, store each different email account in it's own "database" my crontab looks like this: #Email backup 0 0,6,12,18 * * * /usr/local/bin/gmvault sync -d /XXXXXXX/email-backup/joshstrange --resume josh@joshstrange.com >> ~/mail-backup-logs/joshstrange.com.log 2>&1 0 1,7,13,19 * * * /usr/local/bin/gmvault sync -d /XXXXXXX/email-backup/otheremail --resume other@otheremail.com >> ~/mail-backup-logs/otheremail.com.log 2>&1 .... I sync it all locally to my house then back it up to Dropbox as well. The reason to store them in different databases is you cannot "filter" them out when restoring so if they all go to the same DB if you restore you are restoring ALL your email across all accounts to one new account. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12987670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12987670 [1] http://gmvault.org/ http://gmvault.org/
- chme 9y agoI use imapfilter[0] to sort imap mails on the remote server and move older ones to a local dovecot instance for long term backup. That way I have current mail available on all my devices and access to the backup via mutt or via file in the MH format on the backup system. That works, but you have to program a bit lua in order to setup imapfilter correctly. [0] https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter
- DavideNL 9y agoIf i backup my Macbook hard drive (thus including all Mail data/my imap mail account) does this backup include ALL the data stored at my imap mail server? Or would i be missing certain parts, like attachments or whatever? Would OfflineIMAP download 'more' data than i already have backed up?
- softwarelimits 9y agoWould anybody please like to recommend a good sql schema (that makes sense) for storing emails (possibly downloaded with this fine piece of software). Also a hint about a maildir -> sql import tool would be interesting to see. If you have already made your experiences with storing email in a sql database, it would be very appreciated if you would like to write about the pitfalls to avoid and the problems that occured. Thank you very much for your attention!
- e12e 9y agoI'd have a look at dbmail.org (an Imap server with a rdbms backend). If I've understood correctly, after some years they landed on a fairly straightforward schema with appropriate indexes. There's also "Archiveopteryx": http://aox.org/ http://aox.org/ Another question is what do you want to do? I've not played that much with sql store for mail - but notmuch (and mailutils) make good use of Xapian for quick index/search of mail, if that is your end goal.
- znpy 9y ago> IMAP's main downside is that you have to trust your email provider to not lose your email. While certainly unlikely, it's not impossible. With OfflineIMAP, you can download your Mailboxes and make you own backups of your Maildir. A professional mail host ('professional' as in 'someone that somehows makes money by hosting email') is way more unlikely to lose data than most of us are. Making backup is great by the way, but for such task I'd strongly recommend the good old fetchmail or the newer (and better) fdm (https://github.com/ft/fdm https://github.com/ft/fdm). Both support imap(s). Both can save to either mailbox or maildir. If you need a local copy, go for fdm and a local copy of your mailbox, plain and simple.
- gh02t 9y ago> A professional mail host ('professional' as in 'someone that somehows makes money by hosting email') is way more unlikely to lose data than most of us are. I think their point is not that you're less likely to lose it yourself, it's that the probability that both you and the provider losing it at the same time is extremely unlikely. I.e., two points of failure required to lose your data.
- jaskerr 9y agoThe fdm project is dead. The Sourceforge project page returns 404, and the Github repository hasn't been updated since 2014. (And the Sourceforge mailing list returns 404 as well.) The code probably works, but don't expect any help or updates.
- uzoodoo 9y agoSourceforge is gone after the mass-exodus following its questionable practices. The github is here, last commit a few months ago: https://github.com/nicm/fdm/commits/master https://github.com/nicm/fdm/commits/master Not sure where the "ft" repo came from.
- znpy 9y agoI used it a couple of months ago and it worked perfectly. Not all dead projects are actually dead. Some are just "completed".
- drkhsh 9y agoi use a similar program named isync aka mbsync. it is written in c and i like it more than offlineimap!
- zbuf 9y agoI wanted to use an IMAP sync but after much experimenting with existing tools concluded that the protocol wasn't flexible enough for a proper two-way synchronisation. I can't remember the exact reasoning now but several years on I am using dovecot's excellent dsync protocol over SSH to keep my laptop in sync with a private mail server, and have never looked back. Combined with pine, exim and the excellent mairix (surprised not to see that mentioned yet) I enjoy a decent search on a fast MailDir implementation, with full offline support.
- AndyMcConachie 9y agoI believe this is called POP3.
- rakeshsr 9y agoThis is good as a standalone IMAP client. We have done a IMAP Client Server, which will run multiple IMAP accounts which means this particular server will fetch/sync all the mails and monitor for new mails and flag changes. Almost works with all the IMAP email server without any issue. Some stats: * We have more than 25K IMAP accounts running across 3 different 8core machine. * Application is written over our custom async web server and our nio tcp client. * Handling more than 50k connection per server instance. Running a standalone client is much more easier because we have to concentrate only on syncing/fetching 1 account per instance. Rather in our IMAP Client Server we have to deal with multiple accounts with connection restrictions,failover handling, proper retry mechanism etc... We have done this backend engineering for one our product. https://www.zoho.com/salesinbox/ https://www.zoho.com/salesinbox/
- amirouche 9y agoI just installed nylas mail to see whether it support well plain text emails. It seems to me all this mail solutions requires that the password of the mail server must be somewhere visible in a poor plain text file which is a no-go for me.
- icebraining 9y agoIt seems to me all this mail solutions requires that the password of the mail server must be somewhere visible in a poor plain text file which is a no-go for me. There's an addon that lets you store Thunderbird's passwords with Gnome's keyring. That said, in the end you must either type it each time or it must be stored in a way that can be read in an automated way. https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords