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reddragdivaYou get up tomorrow and log into GMail. You can't get in. Your account is locked. Your mail, calendar, documents — all gone. What do you do now?
Remember that Google has no customer service, even for paying customers. If your account is locked for any reason, spurious or not, you're utterly fucked.
I keep a regular backup of my GMail. The way to do this that actually works (unlike Thunderbird, IME) is with OfflineIMAP (cheers to ideological_cuddle for the tipoff). It's command-line and geeky, but by crikey it works.
Using it on Ubuntu or Debian is absurdly simple:
- sudo apt-get install offlineimap
- Set up a ~/.offlineimaprc file cut'n'pasted from this one, with your own username and password.
- offlineimap
This will create a folder with all your mail in it, in maildir format (plain text, one message per file). You will have duplicate messages in different folders. I'm just doing this to get an archive, so zipped the result.
GMail's IMAP interface is subtly broken, to the point where it can crash offlineimap. Just start it running again, repeat as often as necessary. (If you like, get a more current version.)
GMail is still the best email interface I've ever used, and I wish Thunderbird would just get the hint and clone it to the last detail. But this way I also have all my stuff myself, just because I can.
I haven't tried this on a Mac or Windows. Could someone do this and write up instructions?
For other Google services, you can get your data from Google Takeout. While your account's not locked.
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 12:01 am (UTC)I read your earlier article but still didn't quite follow exactly how Thunderbird doesn't cut it?
Why the duplicate folders? Is this because offlineimap doesn't preserve folders/tags?
Might have to catch up with you one day soon, to talk over the technical details of this and a few other linuxy things. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 12:08 am (UTC)Duplicates are because there is an IMAP folder called "all mail", a folder for each named mailbox (inbox, bin, spam, sent) and a folder for each label.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 12:27 am (UTC)Would be nice if it didn't have to duplicate messages to preserve tags, maybe by using linking on linux. Downloading and storing several copies of each message seems wasteful.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 12:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 09:09 am (UTC)folderfilter = lambda foldername: not re.search('(^\[Google Mail\])', foldername)
to avoid the duplication.
GMail presents labels as IMAP folders, so if you have a message with multiple labels it will appear in multiple folders. But that's probably what you want anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 09:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 12:47 am (UTC)I use this on my Windows machine:
http://www.gmail-backup.com/
I don't have that drive plugged in at the moment, but recall it was relatively easy to install and use. Install (or just run the exe) point it where you want to put the backup folder, set the dates and run.
Et viola.
No idea if there's a way of importing the resulting files into any other e-mail program, but the data is saved. I should probably put it back together and run it again.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 09:12 am (UTC)The latest iteration of the bundled Mail application is remarkably GMail-like in its interface. If ti could get it to play nice with GMail I'd use it instead of the web interface, and at some point once iCloud hits I'll see how their mail service goes -- Apple do at least have a customer service department.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 10:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 10:18 am (UTC)The offlineimap dev mailing list, and hence the main driver for development, is mainly frustration at GMail's spectacularly flaky and indifferently conformant IMAP implementation, so I'm not entirely surprised that mail clients that aren't working hard on that specific problem don't manage to solve it.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 10:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 10:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 10:25 am (UTC)I could probably easily write something that could specifically archive GMail's rather funky mailstore, but it's not an itch I need to scratch.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 10:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 10:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 10:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 11:11 am (UTC)Were I to write an archiving tool, it'd do just that: a GMail-specific IMAP client that mirrors the remote server into a local Maildir+ with hardlinks for messages with multiple labels. It'd not be threaded, provide an IMAP interface, or two-way sync, because those are just unnecessary complications, which makes it a fairly simple Perl script, really.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-25 09:44 pm (UTC)Perhaps the tags could also be inserted as some sort of X-Tags mail tag, does anyone know if there's a standard tag commonly used for this?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 10:24 am (UTC)If you use GMails filters and labels then you won't see any of the label-to-folder mapping because that all happens in the root prefix.
If you tell Mail.app to not use a prefix, you get everything twice. It also seemed to only pull in a few messages from the inbox -- I got five of the couple thousand -- but that may be because I only gave it half an hour before giving up.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-26 06:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-27 12:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 03:14 pm (UTC)For paying customers, you get nearly nonexistent, abysmal customer service.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 07:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-24 09:20 pm (UTC)I wish Thunderbird would fucking stop making changes to the UI, and concentrate on not exploding all over the RAM constantly. Why a mere fucking MUA needs its very own GB of RAM just to work disgracefully is beyond me anyway.
(Sadly, my boss insists on TB, because "it works" for him on his Windos. Me, I'd rather pay someone to make better MIME- and IMAP-support for exmh, which is still the best interface for managing 1k+ mails/day in a gazillion folders, and by a long shot.)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-25 07:56 pm (UTC)(I'm not 100% convinced this is Google's fault, but I hear what you are saying).
Anyway, I am using it. We shall see how it goes.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-25 08:05 pm (UTC)GMail's IMAP implementation
Date: 2011-07-27 05:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-26 07:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-01 11:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-07 10:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-07 10:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-14 10:11 am (UTC)On Windows, install cygwin from http://www.cygwin.com/ and be sure to include "offlineimap" from the huge list of packages.
(I already had openssh, rsync, vim and others installed, so I just re-ran the installer and selected offlineimap additionally)
Then follow the instructions above.
It's working just fine as I type, and is no doubt subject to all the same caveats about GMail's IMAP implementation as have been expressed already.
The version currently on offer with Cygwin seems to be 6.0.2-1
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-14 11:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-14 04:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-26 10:36 pm (UTC)I forward from my home domain on its ancient crusty spam-harvested up the yinyang address (it's the same one that went with my NIC handle, before they deigned to offer to sell us the option to hide it from spammers) spam and all, so I used to giggle as Google's spam filters struggled to catch up with spamprobe in efficacy. They've actually gotten pretty good at catching spam by now, after having been fed oh-so-many reams of spam, but they're still worse about false positives. (I think because many people operate like my husband, and simply mark things as spam if they're too lazy to unsubscribe from a perfectly valid mailing list. I have had words with him over this.)
Hey, worse about false positives. Where Else Does Google Do That, hm? :)
Anyhow, if you have another account somewhere, forwarding is a perfectly feasible way to mirror all new mail, if not the old.