<i>I'm not leery of Google shuttering its Gmail service, but I can imagine a scenario where they cut off my access to Gmail and I have no way to plead my case to the search behemoth.</i><p>I am baffled at how people continue using such a service for something as important as e-mail in 2012, while still being fully aware that their access can be completely cut off at random with no reason or recourse. Does everyone just assume "it won't happen to me"?
Instead of putting the password in as a plaintext argument, you can store it in the OS X keychain and access it with the command described here: <a href="http://www.maclovin.de/2010/02/access-os-x-keychain-from-terminal/" rel="nofollow">http://www.maclovin.de/2010/02/access-os-x-keychain-from-ter...</a><p>I use this in my .zshrc to create Bitbucket repos on the fly:<p><pre><code> function bitbucket() {
curl -X POST -u masnick:`security 2>&1 >/dev/null find-internet-password -gs masnick.bitbucket.org | cut -d '"' -f 2` https://api.bitbucket.org/1.0/repositories/ -d name=$@ -d scm=git -d is_private=True
};
</code></pre>
(Running "bitbucket newrepo" will create a new repo in my Bitbucket acct called "newrepo".)
Another good one is <a href="http://gmvault.org" rel="nofollow">http://gmvault.org</a>. I used this just recently to backup and transfer all of my Google Apps emails to a separate gmail account since I'm transferring my apps domain to a different provider. Going just off of what the article says about BaGoMa, Gmvault seems to be comparable in features.
My main problem with this is that it would require me to store my password, in clear text, in a shell script.<p>I'm no security expert but that raises a red flag for me. I'd rather have some way of entering my password each time I want to back up, but this would also make the cron process impossible.
My Mac app, CloudPull, does something similar. CloudPull backs up Google Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Drive (formery Docs) and Reader to your Mac. <a href="http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/</a><p>CloudPull stores your password securely in the Mac OS X keychain.
So. GMVault looks like the best solution except:<p>1. It saves one big inscrutable .db file rather than individual messages in some compatible format or other.<p>2. It doesn't seem to play nice with laptop suspend. If I'm going to run it as a scheduled task then it needs to not get confused if I shut my laptop lid in the middle of a run.<p>3. It could be clearer about the correct workflow for continual incremental backups. It sounds like you probably want to do one full backup, continual partial backups and then occasionally a full backup in case your labels have changed. I don't like choices.
On most stock OSes, this will show your password to anyone who views the list of processes on the machine.<p>Try 'imapsync' [1] instead, as it uses a config file for your credentials instead of command-line arguments, keeping the secret(s) out of the process list.<p>Also, the author of this blog post is showing his inexperience:<p>> BaGoMa's output is pretty informative so I send it to log a file in case I ever want to check up on it and make sure the backups are still working.<p>You won't ever do that (no reason to check the logs when it's working), and it will fail (effectively-silently) one day without you noticing, and then you won't have backups when you actually find that you need them. Don't do it that way.<p>Instead, use a cronjob wrapper script (e.g. [2]) that is silent on success and outputs on error, so the "cronjob-output-as-email" feature works to notify you when it breaks.<p>[1] <a href="http://imapsync.lamiral.info/" rel="nofollow">http://imapsync.lamiral.info/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/sneak/misc/blob/master/cronify/cronify" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sneak/misc/blob/master/cronify/cronify</a>
"X It's hosted on SourceForge, just kidding that was weird and scary"<p>It <i>is</i> hosted on SF, and that IS weird and scary. In this day and age, why would your new cutting-edge FOSS offering be delivered on SF rather than github?
<i>People were raving about it on a forum</i> - well I'm sold on the idea. In all serious though, if you assume that your email service will be around forever you probably shouldn't be on the Internet. Cudos to the author, I haven't really seen the point stressed enough that you should backup your email, especially on a service as large as Gmail.
I like it. Just got it going.<p>Specifically I like that it stores all your emails as plain text, one file per email, so you can easily use/write other tools to search/browse your backups if you need to. Maybe someone already has?<p>(Well, it stores the raw email contents as text. Most emails have a text/plain bit but not all, so you can almost just use grep.)
If you're going to go through that level of effort and you're going to have a computer on at 3am, just run your own SMTP/imap setup and back that up.<p>You'll never have to worry about getting kicked off or them going under then.<p>I've been running my own mail server for 15 years and I've probably spent a couple of hours administering it over that time.
Does this generate some sort of "standard" mbox file? something one can open with Thunderbird or similar?<p>Probably more convenient than periodically running a POP3 client.