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Comment by perlpimp | Hacker News Reader

Going on a tangent, there should probably be a set of universal backup formats that can be advertised as being somewhat portable. So that, if you need to can take your mail and other online business stuff elsewhere if need be. Beyond this article a user might start working for some place that does not allow external app use, but they can bring their data with, to be loaded onto the service. I guess like github and git. but with mail and calendar stuff.

my 2c.

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We do have those formats. Mbox for mail, iCalendar for calendars, vCard for contacts. They're all IETF standards.

Google provide data export from nearly all of their services in standard formats. Where no established open standard exists, they provide clean HTML or JSON.

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

Is there any good way to automate this monthly

There are several commercial solutions for G Suite backups including SpinBackup and Backupify.

https://spinbackup.com/products/google-apps-backup/ http://www.datto.com/backupify/google-apps-backup

I wouldn't actually call Mbox a standard. Thunderbird supports it, but I'd argue it sucks as a way to escape Gmail, because no competitor to Gmail supports it as an import method. In fact, even Gmail itself can't import from Mbox. It may be a standard in that it's defined somewhere officially, but it's not really a standard in the definition that it's commonly used.

As someone who has nearly completed their GExit, I'd say I found Takeout to be borderline useless as an export strategy.

There are several tools available to convert from Mbox to proprietary mailbox formats.

Couldn’t you import the Mbox archive in Thunderbird/Claws-Mail/something and then copy the mails to whatever cloud provider you wish to use?

And it's pretty easy. I have a few accounts on Thunderbird and I can drag and drop e-mail directly from one account to another, I think they are .eml files. You can also have local accounts just for storage.

On the one hand, there are many mbox variations and you may encounter some difficulty in getting your emails out of the Takeout mbox file.

On the other hand, please understand that there is no better option. Said differently: Google Takeout has made the BEST choice here. I giggled with delight when I saw they chose mbox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox

    [...] 1975 [...]

For Email with IMAP, you have the wonderful offlineimap tool[0], I have been using it for years, you can easily perform a maildir format[1] backups of all your email accounts.

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

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir

Agree - Maildir is a pretty good format, because it's just RFC822 (5322 these days, but who's counting) files with weird filenames. mbox format isn't too bad either.

Calendar data you can mainly download as .ics files. Addressbook data is somewhat trickier, a directory full of VCARDs is probably the gold standard.

Yep, .vcf is pretty nice, also stores the contact image inside.

mbox format is horrible, because if the irreversible "From" quoting it requires. And as an "editable" format (e.g. If you want to delete an email in the middle of it), it is perhaps the least robust possible.

Maildir is ok. Mbox couldn't be retired early enough.

I have been taking a Thunderbird local dump of all my Google mail for years as a backup (Thunderbird's mbox format is readable everywhere) so I can clear my Google account regularly, yet have a backup.

No idea what I'll do when Thunderbird eventually goes away - what is the replacement with identical functionality on macOS? I only want to grab mail and append to my existing mbox files.

Hopefully it won't go away. It's transitioning to an independent support setup.

You can donate to the project, I just did so today in fact:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Donate

Thanks for the info.

Not sure if Postbox on the Mac will meet your needs or not but it's based on Thunderbird and done by a company founded by Thunderbird's lead engineer. It's a paid product, but well worth it...I use it as my main email app.

https://www.postbox-inc.com

Thanks for the link, I will take a look. Do you happen to know what its mailbox format is underneath? That's the main crux issue for me. It would have to be a format I could migrate easily like mbox.

eg. my Outlook PSTs and OSTs are useless to me as I have nothing that will open them.

offlineimap is pretty good. You can use the (very!) standard Maildir format, and eventually re-upload your emails elsewhere if you move.

Legally, you're at the mercy of the provider to supply these. Most third-party applications that would provide effective backup solutions could be construed as illegal under the CFAA, as long as the ToS includes boilerplate forbidding automated or proxy access (and almost all do). Even without such a ToS, courts can and have held that merely visiting a page can constitute a copyright infringement based on the momentary copy stored in RAM being unauthorized, and specific notification that the company no longer wants you contacting their servers would also cause any future access to violate the CFAA, more or less regardless of the text of the ToS.

There was a company called Power Ventures. They made it easy to export your Facebook data. They never stored anything the user didn't have a copyright interest in (that is, they only stored the user's own data, like their profile pictures and status updates). Nevertheless, Facebook took them to court and shut them down. The company had trouble retaining a lawyer after the shutdown (and companies must be represented by a member of the bar -- pro se is not allowed) and ultimately, the founder was held personally liable for $3 million in damages.

That's what happens if you look like even a remote threat to a major technology incumbent.

We need to fix our tech access laws.

With e-mail, as long as you have IMAP support you can relatively easily download all your mails and upload them to another server. Just takes a while if you aren't good at cleaning out old stuff. There even are companies offering that as a service if you don't have a fast internet connection, only a mobile device or ...

Or you can use imapsync; make sure you get the latest version from github as the version that ships with most Linux distros is really old. As it is written in Perl you can run it on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It handles one way sync in either direction and two-way sync. It copies all the flags and whether emails are marked read etc.

Blatant violation of the First Sale doctrine. Class action lawsuit incoming in 3..2..

I think the legal theory behind this would be that you have agreed that Google can terminate your account for any reason.

Furthermore, they're not preventing you from reselling your phone at all - just deleting your account. Not "deleting your account if you do resell it" just deleting your account. First sale simply means they can't sue or get you arrested. They can do anything else with you, and refusing to do any further business with you certainly falls within that scope.

Without additional laws there's nothing to do here.

TLDR: never use your main Google, or Facebook, account for anything, not even buying a Google made phone, or buying Facebook ads for your own company, just never ever do that, so that at the very least, the pain is spread. They are businesses, and you do not want to give them a trivial way to retaliate or use this in a negotiation.

>never use your main Google, or Facebook, account for anything, not even buying a Google made phone, or buying Facebook ads for your own company, just never ever do that, so that at the very least, the pain is spread.

Be easy :) . I have 6 facebook accs for 5 of which I forgot passwords, 4 google accs out of which 3 got permalocked because sms confirmations simply never go through to half of Russian numbers, and I think 5 Paypal accounts all of which got blocked because "hey, you are the guy whom we blocked last year! you dared to register again? unforgivable!"

Yes, don't keep things online, you will be better off

>I think the legal theory behind this would be that you have agreed that Google can terminate your account for any reason. //

Just because they claim it doesn't mean it's legal nor moral.

We, as you intimate, probably need legislation to protect the data of users, requiring companies to take due care of it and requiring they provide access to users leaving a service, etc..

Moreover I think work needs to be done on enabling products, including software, when a seller/manufacturer withdraws support. Phones could be required to have systems that enable interoperability across service providers. Games could be required to publish servers and/or protocols allowing them to be used when companies EOL them.