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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

So - when was the last time everyone reading this backed up their gmail?

Take the next 5 minutes to install thunderbird (you'll be impressed if you have not seen it in years) and enter the IMAP settings for google and download everything in the background while you work.

When your account gets hacked and you lose everything, you'll appreciate the backup.

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For the record Thunderbird's IMAP sync is not a reliable backup mechanism by itself. If many emails are deleted from your account, Thunderbird will sync (and delete your files locally) before you have the opportunity to copy them off somewhere safe. I know this from deleting all my mails off my gmail account (to make an encrypted archive) and trying to use TB as a reliable storage method -- since I had just taken a backup of my TB directory I didn't lose any mail, but it should be emphasized that TB with IMAP sync is not a backup mechanism.

However, there are some great TB extensions that will allow you to export your mail into a reasonable, portable format every so often. I use ImportExportTools to export my mailbox to an mbox file and store that file securely. I can use this file to reimport to Thunderbird or any other mail client, or even to read some mail directly. :)

I believe you can configure TB to handle this situation differently. That is, if a mail is deleted from the web mailbox, retain the copy on disk.

The only useful advice I got out of IRC was to stay in offline mode until I had copied over to a "local folder". They didn't say anything about a configuration option that would allow me to avoid the sync/deletion.

Of course, this was in Feb 2011. Maybe things have changed now.

This is a great idea, I just set it up on a spare box using Matt Cutts' instructions for getmail and POP3.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/backup-gmail-in-linux-with-get...

If anybody else tries this, I'd recommend sticking with POP3 as getmail's IMAP client seems to mark all your messages as read (not cool).

That should be SOP in any case. Just takes a few clicks to make Thunderbird sync everything from IMAP (Account Settings -> Synchronization & Storage).

I prefer POP3. Then just mix in Dropbox and local backups, and my email is pretty darn safe.

If you have additional services (e.g., Google Docs or Flickr) and are willing to trust someone else with your data, I highly recommend backupify. I set it up for my gapps account and my personal stuff. Pretty easy to set up. And then you can just export all your data at once.

In the interest of full disclosure, I do know the backupify team, but I pay for the product because I find it useful.

or install something like https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync

and be able to backup your imap mailboxes without a GUI

I use http://offlineimap.org/

You'd do better by moving out of gmail (if you have one) and host your own mail as it was originally intended to be.

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