Drink your poison.

[reddragdiva]

• This wins just for the title: The Craigslist Penis Effect. (≈SFW, no penises visible.)

I tried backing up seven years' Gmail over POP. Has anyone else ever tried this? It got to December 2005, and now insists "No new messages on server." Anything I can do from here to get POP working properly, or has Gmail got my mail forever? I'm currently trying to get local copies of everything over IMAP.

arkady has shown no signs whatsoever of migraines since she got her teeth done, which is pretty good considering the migraines were so bad she'd actually applied for disability. We're cautiously optimistic. I'm having to get used to showing up at the office again.

Comments

[mstevens]

I tried backing up seven years' Gmail over POP. Has anyone else ever tried this? It got to December 2005, and now insists "No new messages on server." Anything I can do from here to get POP working properly, or has Gmail got my mail forever? I'm currently trying to get local copies of everything over IMAP.

Insert standard FSF propaganda here.

[reddragdiva]

Indeed. I went for the account because they reassured "OF COURSE YOU CAN DOWNLOAD EVERYTHING." Be nice if doing so worked too.

[mstevens]

To be fair I've never had trouble downloading stuff with IMAP.

[greylock]

I used a (Windows) utility that successfully backed up almost 10 years og Gmail (only 300-odd MB), if that helps at all.

It's stored in some odd interface, but is basically text. Which is nice.

[siderea]

Impressive. Gmail is only seven years old.

[greylock]

Well, I did say *amost* 10 years (so it's not incorrect since I got my account in April 2004 and I'm coming up on my eighth anniversary with it) and I figured the size of the mailbox was the more important issue.

Which, if we are being super accurate is estimated 318MB.

[sharplittleteeth]

Are you backing up your Gmail because of the recent outages? Or is there something else I don't know about?

(We need to migrate away from Lotus Notes at work, and Google Apps for Education is one option I want to investigate.)

[reddragdiva]

No, no reason in particular :-) I just thought I should have a local copy, and to see if it could be done.

[ideological_cuddle]

I've been using offlineimap to keep a local copy of my gmail account. Works tolerably, though it occasionally gets stuck and needs to be killed.

[reddragdiva]

This turns out to be the GMail server being flaky. I reported the bug and the devs have some idea what's happening; if I can get the problem I'm having more reproducible, a fix should follow shortly. They are most helpful and seem to have a visceral loathing of hangs and crashes.