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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

isync (aka mbsync) works great for this.

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.

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.

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.

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