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Comment by melvinmt | Hacker News Reader

Don't use IMAP for backups, use POP3 instead. If your e-mails are deleted in the cloud, your local IMAP e-mails will disappear as well.

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IMAP is just a protocol. You're talking about syncing over IMAP. You can just fetch over IMAP too.

Also, POP3 is not folder-aware. You can only access your inbox over POP3. If you want to backup anything (e.g. drafts, sent mail, etc), then you need more than POP3.

Actually do. Since he's using getmail, its making a copy to his local system. It just happens to be able to do that over IMAP. You are better off doing this than doing the same with POP because Gmail's POP deletes mails as you read them, which is non-standard. You could lose emails if there are network, disk, or other errors.

gmail's POP server doesn't delete mail. What it does do is disappear them from the POP listing (ignoring any client "leave messages on server" config), although even this is resettable through the web interface.

Gmail POP does not deleted mail as you read it. I have a POP client on my Mac that output pulls Gmail as a backup of my webmail. Nothing gets deleted.

Ok you're right about it not deleting by default. But there is an option to delete mail after its been accessed with POP. And in any case Gmail hides the message after you've read it, but you could still have an error writing the message to disk and thus miss backing that message up.

If your e-mails are deleted in the cloud, your local IMAP e-mails will disappear as well

Vice-versa too. I learnt this the hard way :(

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