Backing Up an IMAP Folder Tree? 32
Jason Weill asks: "After finishing up school, I'm transitioning away from my school-run IMAP e-mail account. During my time, I managed to save thousands of messages in dozens of subfolders in my 'Inbox' hierarchy. Pine lets me save an entire folder to a file easily. Mozilla creates a folder tree when I drag 'Inbox' into a local repository, but none of the messages in the subfolders are downloaded. Opera M2 assimilates all those messages into my collection, but it flattens them all into one giant mess. Are there any scripts or programs that can easily export an entire folder tree to files or import it into a local repository for an e-mail program?"
Outlook Express (Score:1, Flamebait)
IMAP to IMAP (Score:3, Interesting)
Antother options, if you have a shell account and they setup maildirs in your
Re:IMAP to IMAP (Score:2)
imapxfer (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.washington.edu/imap/
The source for the utilities is at:
ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/imap-utils.ta
A.
Yes, and kinda unrelated... (Score:2)
Re:Yes, and kinda unrelated... (Score:1)
I have used fetchyahoo (http://fetchyahoo.twizzler.org [twizzler.org]), and yahoopops (http://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]) to get my mail from Yahoo, and freshmeat also lists another alternative http://mrbook.org/mrpostman/ [mrbook.org]
I currently use Izymail http://izymail.com [izymail.com] since it handles both yahoo and hotmail in one small package. It also presents an IMAP interface to access subfolders on those accounts.You still have to move your mail from POP to IMAP, but that can be handled by most e-mail clients.
Hope this helps.Balam
My personal solution: Squeak (Score:3, Interesting)
I was long wanting to switch to the email client in Squeak, Celeste, as I spend most of my time in Squeak. I even telnet'd from it to access my email from within a client in Squeak.
So, I setup Celeste to get my mail via POP. Had it download all my messages in my INBOX. Then, I downloaded the mail folders from the Solaris machine. Gzip and ftp. Celeste has the ability to import messages from Unix mailbox files. So I did that, into respective folders/categories. All done, less fuss than reading through the replies in this Ask Slashdot.
Most clients can read mbox format.
If you can't get to your raw mbox files, it would be easy to write a script to pull out messages via IMAP, and then output them to Unix mbox format. Then import. I was working on a similar thing before figuring out I could simply download my mbox files. I had written most of a script that went to the mail server, iterated over each mail category and saved it to the mail database. Squeak provides a nice MailDB class for it's own mail database format, so it was less than a dozen lines of code.
Use Evolution (Score:1)
I moved one IMAP tree from an old account directly into the new one. I'm not even sure if it downloaded locally first or just moved from one server to the next.
Screw that outlook express peice of microsoft junk. Whose posting on slashdot lately??
freshmeat.net - search for IMAP copy (Score:4, Informative)
IMAP Copy [freshmeat.net]
Similar question, archiving? (Score:2)
Re:Similar question, archiving? (Score:2, Insightful)
===BEGIN UNTESTED CODE BLOCK===
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use File::stat;
use strict;
$username = ""; #Your username here
my $fileLocation = "/home/username/Maildir/cur";
my ($yearCreated,$year);
print "Enter year to remove: "; chomp($year = );
chdir "$fileLocation";
while(){
(undef,undef,undef,undef,undef,$yearCreated,undef
if (!copy("$fileLocation/$_", "Archive/$fileLocation/$_")){
print "Could not Move Files...Exiting...\n\n";
exit;
}else{
print "$fileLocation Was Copied Successfully\n\n\n";
}
unlink "$fileLocation/$_" if ($year == ($yearCreated+1900));
}
If anyone cares to test it and correct it that would be nice...
isync (not the apple program) (Score:2, Informative)
pkg_add -r isync
or go to
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~me/isync/
I used Netscpae 4.7 mail client (Score:1)
How about asking your mail admin? (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, not all postmasters are that helpful :) But it never hurts to ask.
rfc 2060 - all a nerd needs (Score:2)
there's lots of options... (Score:4, Informative)
offlineimap - IMAP/Maildir synchronization and reader support
http://gopher.quux.org:70/devel/offlineimap/
isync - synchronize a local maildir with a remote IMAP4 mailbox
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~me/isync/
fetchmail (Score:1)
1. You would have to download every imap folder separatelly.
2. Since default mode of operation for fetchmail is to retrieve mail from server and put it into local smtp system, you would have to direct it to deliver mail to procmail or other program, that would deliver messages to mbox or maildir.
Robert
fastmail.fm (Score:2)
use perl (Score:3, Interesting)
The advantages of doing this is that you can then save it into any format you want. I personally was using it to do a IMAP server to server copy, and it worked fantastically.
If I still had the script, I'd post it, but it was many, many harddrives ago that I saw it last.
/mike
Just use Netscape/OE and change offline settings (Score:3, Informative)
If you use NS, I think they're saved in mbox format. In any case, you then have them locally and can archive them from there (or transfer them to your new IMAP server).
Re:Just use Netscape/OE and change offline setting (Score:2)
Evolution (Score:2)
What does this have to do with you? Sorry, I'm off track. What I found at work is that this thing is the Outlook Express of the Linux world. (If you've never really looked at OE, it's tough. Microsoft actually made a really good product, and then covered it up with their much less useful one, Outlook.) It does like 6 different mail methods, including maildir. (You never said what OS you're using, but I'm assuming it's Linux.) You can set Evolution up to have both your current IMAP server and a maildir heirarchy. (Just create ~/Maildir with
Yet another way to do it. (Score:2)
That said, I think you could achieve your goal a lot easier with a run of the mill MUA like mozilla/evolution. If at first you don't succeed, google for a solution!
offlineimap rules ! (Score:2)
I run offlineimap from cron on a host at home to keep a backup copy of my mail. It maintains a maildir hierarchy of all my IMAP folders. Setup was quite stratightforward and took me about five minutes. In a word, offlineimap rules !
http://gopher.quux.org:70/devel/offlineimap/
And it is available in Debian.
Re:offlineimap rules ! (Score:2)
> Correct me if I'm wrong, because I very
> well could be. However, isn't it useless
> to run IMAP then. I though IMAP was so your
> email was always stored on an IMAP server and
> then your email client queries the emails upon
> reading them, but your email stays fixed on
> the server until deleted.
No, IMAP is still usefull :
- I can access my whole mail tree through a web interface. And since I use server side filters (Sieve) my mail is always properly sorted.
- I can log on any computer, unpack an IMAP client and I instantly have all my mail handy, with working filters too.
- The backup trick would not work with POP : all messages would be backup up but the archive would grow indefinitely because the deletes on the server would not be reflected on the backup archive.
Windows users can use The Bat! (Score:1)
Hi. (Score:2)
I managed to make a backup to local folders using Mulberry. Mozilla and Evolution, as suggested by several posters, simply wouldn't let me drag and drop a folder onto another. Mozilla would create an empty folder tree and copy INBOX. Evolution displayed its "you can't do this" cursor and produced an error message basically saying "you can't do this."