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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Google Takeout is fine for me - it just gives you an .mbox file with literally everything and it can be imported into Thunderbird or Outlook.

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Solves a different problem. You can't trivially automate takeout. What if I just want an offline record of my emails for the day that google decides to delete me from the internet?

> What if I just want an offline record of my emails for the day that google decides to delete me from the internet?

Well this is what just a normal email client does - it downloads latest emails via IMAP.

What if I don't want an email client? I just want a headless program that downloads my emails. They can be kept on a NAS that is backed up offsite and keeps the emails searchable. I want this to happen even if I don't happen to open an email client on a desktop at my home for months.

That's why imap-backup is useful.

> I just want a headless program that downloads my emails.

Lol that’s an email client! Not all email clients have a manual UI.

I also have my client make a copy in local folders, and then Backblaze scoops both up. It's a little redundant, but it's not that much space use and it gives me something to compare if I ever have reason to worry an email was tampered with on the server and downloaded over the original. More concern toward a hack than government/host meddling.

isync (aka mbsync) works great for this.

Mailpile.is

What if I just want an offline record of my emails for the day that google decides to delete me from the internet?

I'm confused -- Mbox files can indeed be viewed offline.

(Not to say your point about the ease of automating Takeout is not valid.)

Maybe OP refers to the situation where you lose all data since the last takeout, but if you had a daily imap backup running you could mitigate this loss for your emails.

Thank you for clarifying.

I have used Google Takeout in the past and it seemed to work fine.

But the crucial question is, can you use it after your account was automatically blocked? That's when I would acutally have an urgent need for it.

Google now lets you schedule up to 6 automated Takeouts a year, so you get an email every 2 months with links to download all your stuff.

If you do this every year (I do it on Jan 1st as part of some other yearly reminders) then at most you lose 2 months of data (certainly not downplaying the gravity of that but it's better than everything).

That is a bit late. You don't make backups after you lost your data.

Possibly not, so it is best to keep a synced backup of your messages and critical date. mbsync for email and rclone for Drive and Photos.

Whenever I've tried to use Takeout in the past, it's missing a large amount of data. Haven't tried it in a couple of years though.

I prefer Thunderbird. It doesn't need the app password for Gmail. With a bit of effort to you can make it auto open and close via scheduled commands to do a daily sync, or just leave it open.

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