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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

Which "proven email client" do you recommend? There's an Import/Export extension for Thunderbird, one of the last standing desktop mail apps, but it's not good at handling huge, multi-thousand message exports.

gmvault is purpose-built and quite simple. I've used it before with success. It backs up your whole mailbox in one command. Why should we fiddle with a desktop mail client?

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Thunderbird works fine for me to handle several GB of emails (the mailbox archives that it generates are plain text and standard so there's no need to export them). For the command line there are also tools like `getmail`[0], with the added benefit that they work with any email provider.

[0] http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/

FWIW I imported a 6GB .mbox file with Thunderbird last week, worked fine -

I stopped using Thunderbird because it was choking under my 20GB of mailboxes.

> Thunderbird, one of the last standing desktop mail apps

How about clawsmail ? It's a pretty good client too, and still updated.

I love claws mail, but have to switch to thunderbird because it doesn't work well in a 4K monito.

fetchmail, getmail and offlineimap are all "proven email clients" that work great for this.

+1 on offlineimap. Those of us that may be a little strange in the head and prefer using mail clients like mutt will often use it to handle background imap syncing.

I've successfully used getmail to back-up my gmail accounts for over ten years now. It's a classic case of a functional, if a bit crufty, solution blinding one to a potentially better solution, so i appreciate this (gmvault) heads-up. thank you.

To my knowledge you can't run Thunderbird as a background service so you'll have to routinely run it. This can be a job scheduled to run in the background.

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