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Gmail takeouts come in an arbitrarily-ordered mbox file; I wanted something a bit more backup friendly so I created a small tool for that purpose and wrote about it.
Serious question: have you ever needed an email from even 5 years ago? I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.
Also, oftentimes I search email not so much for the content, but to find the timestamp associated with a particular event. I have had to search old email metadata a few times when I get an unexpected question related to time (for example, gmail will ask when you created the account as part of its account recovery process).
For the email accounts I want a backup, I set it to spew out POP3 without doing anything (don’t mark read or delete). I set up Thunderbird with that POP3. It has a backup copy of all the emails. I’ve had searchable emails since like 2004/2005, and I’ve occasionally replied to people and gotten back in touch with very old friends from the Internet.
I saw an open-source tool sometime back (I think, here on Hacker News) that backs up your IMAP mails with a nicely done interface. That would be nice to have.
Edit: Perhaps Bichon,[1] mentioned somewhere in the other comment threads[2] was the one.
Serious question: have you ever needed an email from even 5 years ago? I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.
Serious question: have you ever needed an email from even 5 years ago? I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.
I do have “Clean Inbox”[1] because I don’t see or interact with them, but I keep them. The only emails I see are the actionable “Unread OR Flagged.”
Serious question: have you ever needed an email from even 5 years ago? I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.
Old SMS, iMessage, Telegram etc messages have been useful from time to time too for similar reasons.
Both can also serve as exceptional time capsules that provide windows into past “eras” of life. I occasionally kick myself for not having archived mail and messages from a couple of defunct email addresses and chat apps… without them there’s a hole spanning a few years where visibility is limited.
Serious question: have you ever needed an email from even 5 years ago? I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.
The resulting artifact is a single .zpaq file on disk. This file is only ever appended to, never overwritten, so it plays nice with Restic's own chunked deduplication. Plus it won't flood the filesystem with inodes and it suffers less small files overhead than TFA's solution.
Granted I suspect TFA splitting on the e-mail headers may be chunking more efficiently. Though, unless I skimmed the linked GitHub too fast, it looks like TFA's solution also doesn't use any solid compression to exploit redundancy across chunks. And I trust zpaq as a general purpose tool more than a one-off just for a single use case. The code does look clean, though, nice work.
[0] Average fragment size is 1024*2^N. If the most of the data is attachments that don't change, you can probably use a higher `-fragment N` to have less overhead keeping track of hashes. `-method 3` is a good middle ground for backups. `-m5` gets crazy high compression ratios, but also crazy slow speed. Old versions of ingested files are shadowed by default; use `-all` when you want to list/extract them.