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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

I've been backing up my Gmail with getmail [0], as I'm afraid that a day will come when I'll be locked out of my gmail account and will have no way to restore it. My long term solution is to migrate completely off of gmail, but for now this does the trick pretty nicely.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backup_Gmail_with_getma...

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Not that you're complaining of bad service from Google. But anyone's long term solution should be to treat important things in life as important. In case of gmail, paying $60 a year ($50 for email account and $10 for domain) gets you a permanent address (so if you were to migrate, at least your email address stays the same), an SLA that gives you two weeks to move house should Google decide it doesn't like you (in contrast to immediate termination of gmail free accounts) and phone support from Google. The poorest of us can afford that—no excuses.

As a long time Gmail user heavily invested in it (with over 60GB of email), I'm waiting patiently for mailpile.is to get rolled out.

Take my advice - throw away every email older than 2 years. Not only will you never need them, but they're what the black hats will hang you by should they get the urge. You will feel a huge sense of relief - a weight lifted from your soul as you relinquish the crushing burden of carting about all those dead emails.

(Unless, of course, you work in an industry where longer retention times are mandated.)

Im not a lawyer so there may be subtle details I don't understand, but broadly in England and Wales, you can be sued within either 6 years or 12 years from the date of a breach of contract depending on type of contract, in Scotland 15 years. I don't know about the US or rest of EU, but think carefully about deleting all your old emails. You might have something in there which would be very useful to defend yourself if this ever happened. You would regret this if you had built the next Facebook and some old acquaintance decided to stake a claim based on some gmail conversation from 10 years ago. Better to archive to a redundant backup system I would say.

In the UK, business documents must be retained for six years.

The MailPile page (https://www.mailpile.is/) mentions GMVault (http://gmvault.org/) as their method for backing up Gmail. I haven't heard of GMVault (or MailPile) until just now. Both look promising. I'm glad there is a push in this direction.

I've been using GMVault for the past month and I have really enjoyed it. I wrote a cron job to periodically pull down my latest emails and back them up (encrypted).

Does GMVault store your mail on your machine in a text-readable (I include XML in this) format? Because if it's a binary blob, it's not as useful as it could be.

All emails are stored individually as EML files which is just text. It can also export all your emails into the standard maildir or mbox format so you can easily import them elsewhere.

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