IMAP Email Backup
smalldata.tech
IMAP Email Backup
1–10 of 82 posts
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#2In the same vein the push towards not owning your data also comes with issues[0].
I get along well with a tool called offlineimap[1] though it's python2; you can even use it to sync imap backends[2]. I use it simply to populate a Maildir on my machines.
Sadly I have not found it to work with office365 (then again, what does other than outlook and thunderbird's proprietary subscription based extension?).
[0]: shameless plug: https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#3Recommend IMAPSync: https://imapsync.lamiral.info/
Have used it at pretty massive scale and it handles a hell of a lot of different options.
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#4Recommend IMAPSync: https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ Have used it at pretty massive scale and it handles a hell of a lot of different options.
I tried this recently for moving from outlook.com to mailbox.org and it was painfully slow. Because it fetched every message individually, it would get throttled at about 10 messages/second.
I wrote my own thing using IMAPclient in python and it was a hundred times quicker.
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#5I wrote a small tool in go which allows you to delete email in bulk by sender. It uses the gmail api and conforms to rate limits. It’s pretty neat! Slow, perhaps, the first time you run it since it fetches threads one at a time.
https://github.com/poundifdef/gmail-deleter
The next step would be to have it save and archive email threads. (Would this be useful to anyone?)
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#6Recommend IMAPSync: https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ Have used it at pretty massive scale and it handles a hell of a lot of different options.
I tried this recently for moving from outlook.com to mailbox.org and it was painfully slow. Because it fetched every message individually, it would get throttled at about 10 messages/second. I wrote my own thing using IMAPclient in python and it was a hundred times quicker.
I have moved more than 2000 mailboxes with over a terabyte of data with it. Worked well for me.
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#7Its the reason that I still use POP. Full stop.
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#8First: I use neomutt + mbsync (formerly isync) + notmuch. The local searching was at first a nerd special interest project but has actually become very useful for searching, filtering and otherwise managing my mail.
Second: the button on the article to submit to HN seems to be somewhat... off? I wouldn't mind one that would submit in the first instance and then link to the HN thread on subsequent clicks but having a button that just loads a round into the chamber for all users clicking on it seems like incitement to blogspam.
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#9First: I use neomutt + mbsync (formerly isync) + notmuch. The local searching was at first a nerd special interest project but has actually become very useful for searching, filtering and otherwise managing my mail. Second: the button on the article to submit to HN seems to be somewhat... off? I wouldn't mind one that would submit in the first instance and then link to the HN thread on subsequent clicks but having a…
I’m trying the same setup as you, but I cannot figure out how to use not much from within neomutt. I feel like I am missing something fairly straightforward because apparently not much is integrated into neomutt. Any pointers would be great!
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#10I've been using a similar setup for a few years, and can totally vouch for it. Emails are probably one of the most important things to backup. Not sure what `imapgrab` adds, since fetching mails from imap is exactly what getmail is doing.
That being said, if you go on and set up getmail, I'm not sure what's the point to continue to use mutt through imap (the author mentions decrypting the archive before reading them, so I assume it's not their daily driver and they keep using direct imap connection otherwise). Imap is still useful if you want to read mails on your mobile.
For the encryption part, I found cryfs [1] to be very useful. It's a fuse based app that encrypts files on the fly as they are written to the pseudo fs and stores them in partioned small size encrypted files. Basically, it means you can use the pseudo fs as a regular directory, store your mail in it and read them from it, and then the special layout of the encrypted directory with its small files is especially rsync-friendly (outside of email system, if I store a big file where only a small part has changed, only the files related to these small changes will be uploaded).
An other advantage of going full local : you can use notmuch [2]. It's a mail indexer that allows fast and advanced search within mails. I have all my mails since 2013 locally, and it takes less than a second to make a full text search within them.
The last thing that I love is the ability to use maildrop [3]. It's regexp based filtering and can forward the mail to anything (mailbox or program), so it allows to have advanced filters that can do quite crazy things (my phone sends me mails when my battery is depleted or fully charged, and it triggers desktop notifications on my computer). Not to be abused, obviously. Don't allow anyone to shut down your computer by sending a email :)