ebyblog students and information

Backup Your Gmail

Nothing bad happened…yet. I’m currently looking into backup regimes for the department and it occurred to me the other day when gmail was getting funky that I have a lot of important information there. Other’s have apparently learned this the hard way. Luckily Gmail offers pop access that leaves the messages on the server so I just set-up a normal pop3 account in kmail and downloaded everything so I have a local copy. I could have probably just found some scripts that would do it without the full application but I wanted an easy fix for now. I might write something that I can cron later.

A couple of things I ran into is that for some reason kmail only downloaded around 300-400 messages each time. I’m not sure if this is google throttling or a setting I couldn’t find in kmail. Also remember that Gmail gives you the total conversations under All Mail, not messages. The total number of messages I had to download was much higher.

Here’s a tutorial for Outlook that spurred me into action.

I experienced just the same thing with google apparently throttling. The first few batches of a few hundred mails came through perfectly. Afterwards, it became really annoying, with most of the time only one (!) message at a time getting through.