Ask HN: What is your ideal email backup solution? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your ideal email backup solution?

29 pointsBrajeshwar14 comments

I like to be able to go back and look at emails from the past, when getting in touch with people or to remember what we talked about. I have emails since the early 2000s. My recent migration of my primary email of 7GB is still going on as we speak and I want a better solution.

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I just pull it all down via POP with an email client from time to time and then back that up with my usual system for files. I'm still all-in on Gmail, regrettably, because there just doesn't seem to be an alternative for a huge inbox that doesn't break the bank (and custom domain, multiple users, etc.).

I feel you. I'm thinking of just pop-ing everything to my NAS and move to another provider - I pay for workspace, so the pain is not too high. But I'm not sure if I lose all access to data shared with that account. That would suck.

How about mbsync? Described in part of this blog post https://drewdevault.com/2021/05/17/aerc-with-mbsync-postfix....

I second this. mbsync+notmuch (JGI; hundreds of blog posts) is a great simple solution for storing and querying emails. Only caveat is that notmuch will basically duplicate the email contents in its database, so you’ll end up taking twice the space on disk.

This is gmail specific, but I run "gmvault" to sync my personal gmail to a local NAS on a nightly basis. I then have that NAS backed up offsite to Wasabi, a cloud storage service / S3 clone, using "restic."

Is "GMVault" just for gmail.com or for Google Workspace too?

Sorry, I'm not sure, never tried with a business account.

In theory, it should work since google suite/workspace is has similar settings for SMTP/IMAP etc.

Since nobody mentioned it, imapsync[1] is a gorgeous command line utility that does one thing and does it well: copy an IMAP account from server A to server B, by sync only, so you can stop / disconnect at any time and continue where the copy left.

We use it to transfer around email hosting, but it's also suitable for backups due its sync only mechanism.

[1] https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync

Thunderbird can automatically archive IMAP folders to local ones. I keep 3 months of e-mails online (so I can search them e.g. using my phone) and the rest in local folders on my laptop from where it's regularly backed up with the rest of my files.

My provider mailbox.org keeps last one week’s daily backup (but it does say that that’s an additional gratis feature so no guarantees). Though it has rescued me twice. Once I had nuked all the mails.

Other than that all my mail gets downloaded on Mac via Mail.app and I backup that Mac mail folder[0] to rsync.net, borgbase with borg/vorta and to backblaze b2 with restic. That folder is simply part of my laptop backup setup.

[0] I know this is not ideal but there aren’t many simpler options.

I would like to know this too. Currently I use Thunderbird and just grab all the eml files. There is an addon I use that exports an html file containing a table of everything and it's index. Then I zip it up with the most recent date as the name and put it in a folder.

What I want is to just export my email box and be able to access it like an archive as if I was opening a SQLite database.

I’ve been using the imap-backup container for a couple of years, it has been rock solid. I test a full restore quarterly.

https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup

I asked almost this same question over on lobste.rs a little while back - https://lobste.rs/s/25b3x5/how_do_you_archive_mail

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