Somewhat related. What do people use to keep an offline backup of Gmail, and other mail accounts? Do you need to keep a full download of your mailbox, or is there some way to get an incremental dump (i.e. just things that changed since X)
I'm guessing imapsync could be used to transfer email into Gmail to replace this POP client feature that is being removed, as long as it can sync into a folder.
Maybe... but at that point you're self-hosting a service/app instead of relying on google to pull your other account into gmail. At such point it may be best just to use your vanity email first, and yoink out your gmail into that account.
Q. Can imapsync be used to maintain and restore a local offline copy
of a mailbox, eg for backup purposes, using Mbox or Maildir
format, so that if the server fails, then the mailbox could be
reinstated?
On one machine I have offlineimap.py[1] (with mutt), on the other laptop Evolution[2] that archives my mail locally that I can also export and back up regularly.
Ok, interesting. I checked the docs of offlineimap (thanks, I hadn't found that one when googling!) and it looks like I could use the `maxage` option for the incremental option (I think I want to create a folder for each week, back it up , and delete it after a while).
Do you have anything set up with evolution to handle things automatically?
Sorry, my laptop where I had evolution got a new OS installed and I haven't configured it yet and just started mutt, but my original setup had a local archive folder, with sub-folders per year (I think, I even had a higher level grouping of 5 or 10 years). Unfortunately, I don't have setup right now to check, but I think it was semi-manual, like Evolution was archiving to a local folder automatically, then every new year I just moved the mails from the previous year into a folder).
It's the most performant solution that's also mature. I've used it for years to retrieve all of my email accounts (of which gmail is one) to a folder that I also backup.
I have not tried to do this, but I think you can set MaxMessages in your config to achieve something like this. If I'm understanding correctly, it essentially does a tail on your mailbox. The latest X messages will be kept, where X is the number after MaxMessages: https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/isync/mbsync.1.en.html#...
E-Mails don't take up that much space for it to be any issue to me. Every five years or so I clean out some of the old ones and leave them only in backups.
