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Comment by vasi | Hacker News Reader

The #1 reason I want Gmail backup is to be able to migrate in case something goes wrong with Gmail. Does Gmvault make this possible? I don't see any documentation about exporting from Gmvault to another IMAP server, or to a common format like Maildir or mbox so that I could run my own server.

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If the gmvault on-disc format is well defined why not produce a tool to convert that to maildir or whatever? Gmvault does one thing well (allegedly, I've not used it), "export to some other format" just seems like feature creep especially when conversion can be done offline.

Gmvault stores email content in individual files as text files (EML file) so it should be pretty easy to add some export functionalities (it might be a second tool). I will add that in the road map for v2.0.

Currently Gmvault gives you the ability to save your emails on disk and restore them on any Gmail account with all the features. For example labels will be restored as identical. Many email backup tools are very generic and you will loose quite a lot of information when restoring your emails in a blend IMAP Server. Now all emails are stored in individual EML files with a unique filename. It is quite open and it should be pretty easy to create a Maildir structure. I will add that in the roadmap for v2.0. I am not convinced by mbox because it is a unique file with all the emails concatenated in it. I will see what to do with it.

Yeah, I understand the advantages of Gmvault :)

I also realize it might not make sense to use Maildir as the native DB for Gmvault, since you don't want to store multiple copies of each email like OfflineIMAP does. A 'gmvault export' option would be sufficient for my purposes.

Let me know if there's anything I can do to help!

Yes exactly, I was thinking more of an export option to export in different formats.

I use OfflineIMAP to back up Gmail and Google Apps mail. I have it set up to run every evening from cron, backing up a Gmail account as well as a couple Apps accounts. It uses Maildir format.

[1] http://offlineimap.org/

As said above OfflineIMAP will create a blend copy of your emails and you will loose quite a lot of very interesting features when copying them to a standard IMAP server. That said I understand the need and will think on an approach to allow users to leave Gmail for another IMAP server in v2.0 Another point is that Gmvault is meant to be easy to use. OfflineIMAP is a very good tool but it is meant for advanced users like us as Gmvault is meant for users with very little computer knowledge. Gmvault v2.0 will go further as it will have a GUI (while still having a CLI mode) to allow my Granma to backup her emails :-).

Yeah, I'm currently using OfflineIMAP until I find something better. But it's really not a perfect solution: it downloads emails multiple times (once per label), it doesn't restore to Gmail terribly well, it's pretty slow, and it crashes sometimes. If Gmvault adds some sort of export facility, I'd switch.

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