Thanks for this.

For example:
I’ve got two folders in gmail called: Shipping and Ack”

So I’m assuming I’d setup mailboxes like this:
mailboxes=( “[Gmail]/Shipping”, “[Gmail]/Ack” )

But I’m not sure how to setup the destination so that Shipping and Ack are separate from each other.

Is this even possible?

Thank you.

–Mike

I just set up getmail with POP as described in the original post and successfully backed up all my mail for two Gmail accounts, but I’m confused by the message counts I am seeing in the Gmail web interface versus mutt.

Gmail account 1: 3930 messages when I click “Inbox” in the web interface, 5410 when I click “All Mail” in the web interface, 4523 when I open the mbox file in mutt. The web interface reports 686 MB total; mutt shows 448 MB.

Gmail account 2: 1861 messages when I click “Inbox” in the web interface, 9063 when I click “All Mail” in the web interface, 8198 when I open the mbox file in mutt. The web interface reports 135 MB total; mutt shows 122 MB.

(To look at the mbox in mutt I’m running `mutt -R -f /path/to/foo.mbox`)

Obviously, the message counts from mutt are closer to the “All Mail” counts than the “Inbox” counts, and I feel like this backup is good enough, but can anyone explain the discrepancy?

Thanks for writing this useful tool. I noticed that you suggest people might put their username in the “getmail.gmail” file. However, this seems rather insecure to me. As it stands, any other user on the computer will be able to read that file. At the very least I’d say don’t give anyone permissions except yourself:

$ chmod go-rwx ~/.getmail/getmail.gmail

But even then anyone with root privileges, or anyone who can boot your machine into a root prompt (no password required), will be able to read your password.

while [ $i -gt 0 ]
do
getmail -r /home/david/.getmail/getmail.gmail
done


of course it’s going to eventually start to error out… but that should be after it runs a few hundred times

When doing my initial gmail import there were thousands of emails to download initially, and I didn’t want to sit there and keep running the import script, I also didn’t know exactly how long it would take for each run to time a cron (gmail seems to send back anything from 99 to 2k at a time).

So I modified your shell script to create a file lock to avoid the cron “running over itself”:


#!/bin/bash
if [ -f /tmp/fetch-gmail.pid ]; then
echo 'Already running - exiting;';
exit;
fi
touch /tmp/fetch-gmail.pid
/usr/bin/getmail -q -r /home/bob/.getmail/getmail.gmail
rm -f /tmp/fetch-gmail.pid


You have to run it multiple times initially (can use “for {1..n}; do getmail -r ~/.getmail/getmail.gmail; done”) where “n” is the number of thousand emails you have (rounded up).

From then on (eg weekly) 1000 is probably enough that running it once will suffice. I use maildir for storage as it seems to be more reliable and you don’t run into locking problems, dealing with a massive file, etc.

You need to create the folder and have it writeable, along with three subfolders: cur, new and tmp.


[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = imap.gmail.com
username = xxx
password = xxx
mailboxes = ( "[Gmail]/All Mail", "[Gmail]/Sent Mail", "[Gmail]/Drafts" )

[options]
# print messages about each action (verbose = 2)
# Other options:
# 0 prints only warnings and errors
# 1 prints messages about retrieving and deleting messages only
verbose = 2
message_log = ~/.getmail/gmail.log
read_all = False
max_messages_per_session = 1000
received = false
delete = false


Hope this helps someone. Still has the unfortunate side effect of flagging mail as read. Other IMAP clients manage this trick, not sure why getmail doesn’t.

Here is a simple solution for backing up your mail through Beyond Inbox http://www.beyondinbox.com/ , which let you keep your email organized and inbox clean so that you can find a message when you need it. At the same time, you also need to make sure that you archive and backup your email to prevent the loss in situations like accidental loss of data from email servers, hacking of account, forget password, over size inbox or unpredictable scenarios.
There are five basic functions that we all need to perform in order to manage and safeguard our email- backup, restore, archive, transfer and organize the data. Beyond Inbox can help you perform all of these in a very efficient and easy way.
Using Beyond Inbox, you can backup, restore, archive, transfer or organize email from any IMAP enabled email account.

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You can easily install beyond Inbox. See the link http://www.beyondinbox.com/documentation/mail-backup–how-to-install-beyondinbox.html