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Comment by sct202 | Hacker News Reader

As a former user of SMSBackup+, at a certain point it did seem like I was putting a lot of trust into a 3rd party to have full access to both my text messages and my email. So I can kind of see how it's a risk, but it seems sad to just shut it all down.

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Current SMSBackup+ user here.

I agree with your sentiment, but part of the key difference for me is that SMSBackup+ is open source. I've been building the app myself and using it for years, so I'm very certain what it's doing and not doing.

This may or may not apply to the other apps being affected by this ban.

If you have GSuite, it seems you can whitelist existing applications. I've done that with SMS Backup+, so it should keep working for me. At least that's my understanding.

I suppose that people on the consumer side probably don't have that option, and it's probably not enough to get people to start paying.

I already pay Google as a One customer. Does GSuite have a (possibly not presently enforced) five user minimum?

Any good alternatives for this very useful app?

Presently? None of which I'm aware.

I'm very much hoping that we could resolve the issue with SMSBackup+ for the time being, but that's mostly up to the project owner.

I did hear of some folks using their own IMAP server and CALDAV service to target instead of Google, but I have not tested it.

I attempted to use SMS Gate (a fork) to do backups from the stock messaging app to the SD card. It didn't work.

> I did hear of some folks using their own IMAP server ...

I ended up syncing to a Dovecot IMAP server on my local Linux desktop, which seemed to work just fine. I was apprehensive about the complexity of setting an IMAP server up, but that turned out to be misguided - Dovecot was incredibly simple to get up and running. I assume SMSBackup+ would work just as well as SMS Gate did here.

I eventually ended up moving from the stock messaging app to QKSMS (GPLv3, Github, Google Play, F-Droid) because it has built in backup functionality.

How about an app that just, well, sends the SMS texts to your email, as regular emails? A filtering rule would put them under a certain tag and skip inbox.

The upside of the design is that it requires only one, very clear, permission: send emails to a given address.

SMSBackup+ makes the sender the contact / phone number and the receiver as your number. It's been fantastic for archiving all of my texts and such. I've been able to search it all relatively easily.

It's less clear how to do a 'restore' with that model...

Manually forward 10,000 messages to restore@smsbackup.com?

I reached out to the author because I've been a user of the app for several years, but I haven't heard back (this was only a few days ago). I'm hoping it can continue in some form.

You're likely to have better luck monitoring the relevant issue on the github repo. https://github.com/jberkel/sms-backup-plus/issues/959

Sounds like a great use for Fastmail and their open JMAP protocol.

MS has 'SMS Organizer'. It backups to Google Drive account. Though not sure if it is globally available.

SMSBackup+ works perfectly fine with IMAP backends.

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