
Ask HN: How to backup emails? - pvinis
Hello.<p>I have a university email that works with an old webmail interface and I would like to back it up. Basically all the mails and attachments.<p>Also, what about gmail? Is it possible to back that up?<p>Most importantly, how do I back these up? What do I store them as? In a db? In text files? How do I export everything from the original place to the storage format?<p>Thank you.
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howlett
I use getmail
([http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/](http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/))
which isn't bound to a specific provider. Currently I backup my gmail and
fastmail accounts using this. Here is my daily process:

\- mount truecrypt container

\- run getmail for each account I want to backup (separate .conf files)

\- unmount container

\- sync offsite to rsync.net

All of this runs on my raspberry pi 2 and it's really easy to setup (it's
practically a bash file with 4 commands).

The output is an mbox file which you can import into Thunderbird or any other
client that supports them.

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dustinmr
I’ve had good luck using [https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-
back](https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back) to backup gmail.

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stevekemp
There are tools such as imapsync, mailsync, etc, which are very useful if
you're backing up a remote host which runs IMAP.

I've certainly exported/synced from gmail, gmx, and similar commercial
providers to local Maildir archives.

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shaunpud
I've been using Gmvault [http://gmvault.org](http://gmvault.org) for years to
back up my Gmail, works great!

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jolmg
I use mbsync (aka isync).

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pvinis
Thank you both! I will look into them.

