Comments on: GMail IMAP Backup With mbsync on Ubuntu

By: JW

JW — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 14:06:04 +0000

Hi Chris,

From your searching, did you come across anything for a migration? For example, I want to switch web hosts and would like a tool which allows me to to backup/restore locally, without all the extras. I have no need to use local readers:

imap-tool –backup –dir ~/My–Messages –server mail.example.com –user …

Later, after I switch web hosts (and re-create the users):

imap-tool –restore –dir ~/My-Messages –server mail.example.com –user …

Everything I’ve seen, from how to use imapcopy and imapsync, to this article, seems *really* complex. It seems to be this process should be much easier. Am I being too unreasonable?

By: Alexei

Alexei — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:11:25 +0000

Excellent steps. Thanks !
Small comment:
Step 2 should also include libdb4.2-dev, otherwise ./configure will fail

By: dmitri yakimov

dmitri yakimov — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:23:25 +0000

very useful, thanks.
had a problem with cerificates, now resolved.

By: Brandon Hall

Brandon Hall — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 07:03:33 +0000

You don’t need to download the Google certificates or specify them in the configuration file; it’s sufficient to just supply the certificate for the root authority (in this case, Equifax).

By: Streeter

Streeter — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:42:49 +0000

Michael, I’ll look into that some point. Right now, I just access the mail with mutt. If I’ve got my mail at

/export/backups/mail/gmail/Inbox

Then I run:

mutt -f /export/backups/mail/gmail/Inbox

and I can view the mail. You can actually delete and stuff, but I believe that mbsync will just overwrite the changes since the local mailbox is marked as a slave.

By: Time132

Time132 — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:23:14 +0000

Thank you very much

By: Michael Justman

Michael Justman — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:18:47 +0000

Looking for exactly this guide a few days ago. Thank you.

Wondering if you could create a tutorial for accessing the stored emails via IMAP with a client locally.