Gmail Back up via Fetchmail

Posted on March 4, 2007

Gmail Taking my life out of Outlook and placing it fully into Gmail + Google Calendar has been great. My personal productivity is way up and accessing my e-mail and schedule has never been easier. However, as soon as I made the move I began thinking about the back up issues since I depend on having my e-mail archives for a number of things. Sure, I could POP everything to Outlook or Thunderbird but I wanted a better solution than that. Thanks to Lifehacker that solution came a couple weeks ago and I finally implemented it this weekend.

The basic solution is to use the old command line and fetchmail. Since fetchmail was originally written for Unix you’ll need a Unix emulator. I went with the one Lifehacker suggested. It’s called Cygwin and it works like a charm. For instructions on how to get Cygwin up and running check out this Lifehacker post.

The solution that Lifehacker presents not only backs up all of your Gmail easily into a mbox file that can be accessed in either a text file reader or an e-mail platform like Thunderbird, it also explains how to set up a batch process that will run your Gmail back up automatically at a set time each day. Now that’s a solution!

Here are a couple notes from my installation that should make yours easier:

When you create the .fetchmailrc file you should create it via the Cygwin command line
Make sure to modify the first line of your .fetchmailrc file with “service 995″ - it should read poll pop.gmail.com with proto POP3 service 995 and options no dns
If you want to use Thunderbird to view your mbox file make sure to download this extension to make importing the file easier

The command line can be scary but if you follow Lifehacker’s instructions you shouldn’t have a problem. This solution shouldn’t take too long to implement and it is well worth the time. Click here to head over to the Lifehacker post and set-up your automatic Gmail back up and sleep easy.