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Comment by Loic | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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