I find his concern about losing access to his account interesting because the only feature I get sad that that gmail doesn't have is an easy export/backup tool.

I find his concern about losing access to his account interesting because the only feature I get sad that that gmail doesn't have is an easy export/backup tool. Backupify has a nice service, and I realize I could run IMAP either locally or on a seperate server, but that's less ideal to me than the ability to set up incremental weekly backups to my dropbox/S3/box.net/etc account.