Re: archiving gmail

[Jonathan Cran <jcran () pwnieexpress com>]

I've used the 'larch' gem in combination with running an imapd locally to
pull mail out of gmail and store it. Larch is easy to integrate into (ruby)
apps, and a nice CLI tool too.

Last time i tested was on 10.04 ubuntu, so i'm assuming this still works.
To install larch & dovecot:
  gem install larch # https://github.com/rgrove/larch
  sudo apt-get install dovcot-imapd #
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Dovecot

To retrieve your mail:
  larch --from imaps://imap.gmail.com --from-user
[user]@gmail.com--from-pass [pass] --to imap://localhost --to-user
[user]

You can retrieve by folder / tag too:   --from-folder=[Folder-to-Archive]

To pull down a couple gigs (~5) it took a while, but somewhere in the realm
of hours, not weeks / months.

Hope it helps and thanks a lot for the reminder :)


jcran


On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 9:41 AM, Josh More <jmore () starmind org> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Robin Wood <robin () digininja org> wrote:
> > On 22 October 2012 13:55, Josh More <jmore () starmind org> wrote:
> > > I use getmail:  http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/
> > >
> > > You have to run it in a loop, as Google limits the number of messages
> > > you can pull at a time to around 100.  (Sometimes it's 80ish,
> > > sometimes it's 120ish).
> > >
> > > I generally find that running:  "for i in {1..20}; do getmail -r
> > > ~/.getmail/getmail.gmail; sleep 120; done"  is sufficient for my
> > > backups every few weeks.
> > >
> > > I'm sure you could script this in a better way so it automatically
> > > stops when there's no more mail to get.  Lazy script just uses a loop.
> > >  :)
> >
> >
> > That will take a while then to pull down almost 7G of mails (over 4+
> > years of data). Maybe not a practical option after all.
> >
> > Robin
>
>
> Yes, it will.  I'd do it anyway, as any backup of 7Gb is going to take
> a while and, once done, will be fairly easy to maintain.
>
> -Josh More
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-- 
*Jonathan Cran**
*CTO, Pwnie Express
pwnieexpress.com
(P) 515.890.0070

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