I was in a similar situation a few years ago and decided to build an app for that: https://thehorcrux.com
My goal is to make it simple enough for my grandpa to use it. However, I'm still not there yet. Let me know what you guys think.
IMAP Email Backup
41–50 of 82 posts
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#42Reminder: You likely don't need your email provider to store years and years of old emails. Download them locally, then remove them from the service provider. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine Thanks to the third-party doctrine, messages stored on the provider can be disclosed to the government without a warrant. Your emails have contact history, location histories, attachments, plans, all sorts of s…
Agreed, i also have a yearly reminder to move all e-mails older than X months to my local computer (of which i make backups.)
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#43Reminder: You likely don't need your email provider to store years and years of old emails. Download them locally, then remove them from the service provider. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine Thanks to the third-party doctrine, messages stored on the provider can be disclosed to the government without a warrant. Your emails have contact history, location histories, attachments, plans, all sorts of s…
Honestly, I'm a real proponent of keeping a clean digital life. I practice 0 inbox, aggressively delete old documents, photos on a regular basis. If I haven't touched anything in a few years, the chances that I'm going to need it later on down the line are slim and so off they go.
Important documents like tax info etc, are obviously kept for the minimum legal period but then again they don't take up all that much space.
I've been doing this for around 10 years now and so far I have not had any problems with missing old stuff, _touchwood_.
Long story short, just delete stuff you don't need altogether, makes backups a breeze and frees you from worrying about hackers exposing your musings from when you were a teenager :)
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#44I use OfflineIMAP: https://www.offlineimap.org/
I also use offlineIMAP, but I find that every few months it freezes and needs a kill -9 to exit. My current workaround is killing it once per week and letting my service manager restart it.
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#45Reminder: You likely don't need your email provider to store years and years of old emails. Download them locally, then remove them from the service provider. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine Thanks to the third-party doctrine, messages stored on the provider can be disclosed to the government without a warrant. Your emails have contact history, location histories, attachments, plans, all sorts of s…
Honestly, I'm a real proponent of keeping a clean digital life. I practice 0 inbox, aggressively delete old documents, photos on a regular basis. If I haven't touched anything in a few years, the chances that I'm going to need it later on down the line are slim and so off they go. Important documents like tax info etc, are obviously kept for the minimum legal period but then again they don't take up all that much spa…
I have a 900GB FLAC music library, because cloud music services can disappear tracks down the memory hole from the middle of your playlists your now-dead loved ones made for you years ago[1], and also because they simply don't have a lot of the latest/newest interesting/underground music in their cloud catalogs.
Also:
nostromo:~/Pictures$ du -sh LightroomMasters
1.5T LightroomMasters
nostromo:~/Pictures$ find LightroomMasters -type f | wc -l
207655
nostromo:~/Pictures$ ls -1d LightroomMasters/* | sort -n | head -1
LightroomMasters/1997
nostromo:~/Pictures$
There are different paths, and digital minimalism is only suitable for a subset of the population. Many of us derive immense value from having high fidelity records of our lives and the lives of those close to us.
Also, if you store your historical data for a long time, you can do super cool shit like this: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-ana...
[1]: In case you can't tell, this happened to me.
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#46In 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]: shameles…
Every IMAP client I've tried so far works with office365, though I haven't tried offlineIMAP with it.
Ones I've tried:
fetchmail
sylpheed-claws
evolution
mutt
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've had lots of problems trying to use Thunderbird to migrate to Google suite (mostly network / TLS errors when connecting to Gmail).
Same. I ended up rate limiting my connection to 256kbps and it stayed stable.
Last time I tried doing an IMAP backup using... hmmm, some command-line tool (imapsync maybe?), I discovered that Gmail has some kind of rate limiting baked in and starts throwing errors after that. This would, naturally (/s), cause the tool to restart the process. Limiting your connection speed probably caused the backup to go slow enough that you didn't hit the request limit.
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#48imapsync is my personal favorite approach to this problem.
In addition to imap -> filesystem backups it supports synchronizing mail in both directions. And both source and destination can be remote systems.
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. I ended up rate limiting my connection to 256kbps and it stayed stable.
Last time I tried doing an IMAP backup using... hmmm, some command-line tool (imapsync maybe?), I discovered that Gmail has some kind of rate limiting baked in and starts throwing errors after that. This would, naturally (/s), cause the tool to restart the process. Limiting your connection speed probably caused the backup to go slow enough that you didn't hit the request limit.
Gmail has an abundance of rate limits and, in general, you cannot expect one account to sustain more than about 1 request per second. You might get more but 1 QPS is easy to remember.
Re: IMAP Email Backup
#50Thunderbird is your desktop client that can archive, compress, and store all emails offline. I've even used Thunderbird for migrating all my email history, folders etc. between servers: simply add new account and drag and drop folders between accounts. Simple enough to be used by non technical people who do not want to: >./imapgrab.py -d -v -f ~/user@email.com -s imap.mail.server -S -p 993 -u user@email.com -p passwo…
Be careful using Thunderbird to move mail between IMAP4 servers, on Linux at least - I've had it lose messages on me, deleting them from the source before they're successfully written to the destination. I was moving mail from a Gmail account to a Gandi account about a year ago, before the recent spurt of development activity on Thunderbird.
Am I the only one still using Evolution? I think its IMAP implementation is a lot better than Thunderbird's. I think this could be due to the fact that Evolution was initially written by people experienced in writing mail _servers_ but at this point I'm not sure how much of Evolution 1.0 code survives in 3.0.