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Comment by soft_dev_person | Hacker News Reader

They closed his email-account too, though? It has never occurred to me to backup my entire Gmail archive. Should probably look into that now...

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Admittedly email has also been in my blind spot too.. Not a bad plan that.

Here is a one-click service to backup everything in your google account. Email, google drive, youtube, location history, blogger blogs, bookmarks, calendar, literally ever google service.

https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

What format does this produce? A bit of googling suggests mbox. What happens to 'labels' on emails?

MBOX is correct. Labels become folders. Mail that has multiple labels will be duplicated into each folder.

If you click "details" you can see the format each service is exported as

Nice tool, and can produce archive directly to Dropbox (or Drive, or OneDrive).

Now, if they only could add a periodic option...

I started archiving all my emails a long while back. There are several good tools around, but I'm currently using offlineimap[1][2].

Easily installable via homebrew.

[1]: http://www.offlineimap.org/

[2]: https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap

this looks interesting. Does it also restore to another IMAP provider?

mbsync [1] is worth looking into. I found it to perform better than Offline IMHO and complained less. It will store downloaded emails in maildir format.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Isync

The one gap here, is that if Google closes down your email account you can still be dead in the water if you have any services that rely on that email. Such as email based 2-factor authentication, or any websites that you forgot your credentials for an need to rely on an emailed password reset.

You can mitigate this by having your own domain and host the email on Google Apps -- that way if they take away your access you just update your mx record to point to somewhere else. But you can also easily lose your domain name (due to malice or accident).

BTW, if an emergency does happen, anyone have a recommendation for a decent web email client that I can point my MX record to? Preferably one that has both hosted and self-hosted options. Or something that I can spin up easily on a cloud service such as AWS.

A couple of open source clients [1] and [2]- both self-hosted and deployable on AWS or any other cloud service, or any other hosting service with ssh root access:

[1] https://squirrelmail.org/about/ [2] https://www.horde.org/apps/webmail

As an aside, VestaCP [3] - an open source hosting admin panel that you can install within a few minutes via ssh - will install squirrelmail automatically:

[3] http://vestacp.com/

I started deleting my emails and I feel really better that this big stack of crap is erased forever. The whole concept of archiving mail is disgusting. Everybody is concerned by climate change, but seriously, storing all these data is crazy and dirty, a datacenter is everything but clean.

No backups to deal with and no procrastination-until-the-end-of-your-life. Save the planet and get away from your past.

I have two decades of email saved; it's a few gigabytes and could fit on a single USB stick or DVDW.

I happen to like my past and want to keep it, even if I don't habitually refer to it.

Speaking of that, what is the best way to make a backup of the contents of an email account (not specifically Gmail, but IMAP in general)?

Not sure if it's the best way or not, but I use offlineimap...

An easy way is to use an IMAP client like the macOS Mail.app that syncs raw email + metadata in .mbox format. You can find the files in ~/Library/Mail/V4. Combine with Time Machine for extra backups in case you’re worried that your mail server decides to clear your local copy over IMAP.

Any hosted email account can be disappeared without recourse. Particularly a free one where the company owes you nothing.

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