Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

I use offlineimap to sync several email accounts both to local storage, and to accounts on other free email providers. E.g., a gmail account dedicated to bug reporting is replicated by offlineimap to an outlook.com account.

Address books and calendars for random gmail accounts get synced by vdirsyncer to both local storage and also to other backup gmail accounts.

It works well, and I don't have to worry about e.g., Google permanently locking me out of one of these accounts, without recourse.

* Both offlineimap and vdirsyncer are in Debian's repos. But, I had to pin/install vdirsyncer from testing to get working oath support for gmail (it did not pull in any dependencies from testing that were concerning [I don't recall if it pulled in anything at all, but I would not have installed from testing if it pulled in anything concerning]).

No. Yolo. (Also, in the past 20 years I never needed to find any personal email that's older than a week, so I'm not terribly concerned about the effect of dataloss.)

My email provider ought to have its own backups for their own service-continuity. (IMAP in this case, but the picture looks very similar for POP.)

Meanwhile, my desktop e-mail client (Thunderbird) has its own local files which are captured by a consumer online-backup solution (e.g. Backblaze) along with other documents, photos, etc. That means both local-copies of server mail, and also items which have been perma-downloaded into mailboxes and purged from the server.

In a way, my biggest worry is not backup-coverage of the bytes per se, but potential archeological issues when it comes to arcane mailbox formats. (My second-biggest worry is that my organization is terrible and Inbox keeps growing.)

I'm using fastmail, but mostly for the reputation. I have a cron script that fetches mail every 5 minutes locally with mbsync (I view them with notmuch and emacs). Backup is done alongside my other files.

I'm using lieer and mujmap to sync my Gmail and Fastmail accounts to a local notmuch mail storage on top of ZFS pool. That ZFS pool is in turn replicated off site.

I use neomutt to access my archive over SSH. And notmuch is very fast at searching all of my emails.

* https://github.com/gauteh/lieer

* https://github.com/elizagamedev/mujmap

* https://notmuchmail.org/

My mail provider does some kind of periodic backup which they do out of their own goodness of heart even though they don’t have to (that what they say).

I save important official docs from my mail — I even sometimes export eml files to those archive/backup folders. So all those get backed up.

The emails themselves? Not really — even though the mail folder (Thunderbird’s; not Mail.app’s — can’t trust an Apple made utility app to be part of even a half hearted backup process) is actually part my backup routine as part of one of those 3 backup tools running on my system (and 2 sync tools). But I seriously doubt I am going to find an email from a backup snapshot ever. But if I must I have that.

But I would want to — have wanted to. Maybe a dedicated tool that downloads every single mail and keeps it synced with the server in an email file format that’s most efficient for backup and querying that backup later. Or maybe tweak around Thunderbird that makes that happen.

Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention — I immediately delete those official mails (like statements, bills) immediately after saving those PDFs if I have to. I think I delete 99% of email I receive (okay maybe 80-90% - not sure; you get the idea). Only personal emails are what I never delete. So I never have too much email to begin with. I do the same with photos and videos and screenshots taken - if it can be detected, it will be deleted.

No, I stopped even reading my email unless something prompts me to retrieve something from it.

I don't even keep my emails. I have nothing in my inbox at the moment.

If an email contains something I need to keep, it is transferred to my proper files.

Empty mail, happy life.

I rather move all important stuff out of email and back it up with more relevant tool.

To be calm that if all email is lost - it’s not a big deal.

I find the idea of backing up whole email life silly.

You don’t back up your physical post from beginning of ages, right? You rather keep only small fraction of most valuable things while dumping once in a while all temporarily important stuff.

Email is not a goal for me, just a mean to an end.

No. There is really nothing useful in there. It's mostly just all receipts for online orders that I have never needed.

I view old emails as all of the browser tabs I have open right now: I feel attached to them and avoid closing them. But if they all disappear I'll be fine. I'm not wasting energy backing them up.

Do you backup your Emails?

Yes. I have a combination of self hosted email and a vendor email provider. I access both with IMAPS. I pull down the emails with Thunderbird and never leave them on the server. I back up the local Thunderbird data folder locally then back it up to multiple encrypted SSD/NVME.

I have email going back more than 25 years from various software; in most cases an export dump when I stopped using, say, Pegasus Mail or Eudora. Since I started with Thunderbird I've created a new profile each year, and have profiles going back to 2008.

Earlier this year I imported all this historical data into the Mail Server on our Synology NAS. I don't use this server for current mail, but I can now search these old messages easily from within Thunderbird.

One thing I notice is how much more personal email there was before we started using chat services for group conversations. Nonetheless it's great being able to go back and read correspondence with, say, my dad who died in 2010.

On my Mac I accomplish email backups using the Mail app and Chronosync. I have filtering rules to automatically file messages into multiple IMAP mailboxes based on sender or subject. I periodically manually move messages older than a week to local mailboxes to keep my iCloud storage from getting large enough to require paying for additional storage. The Mail app can also export those local mailboxes to a folder which I then back up using Chronosync so I have local copies on multiple drives.

The whole process only takes about 5 minutes once every week or two. It gives me easy access to over 20 years of email which is nice to have even though I only search the old ones a few times a year.

Get locked out of your account? Hope you had a backup. I lost access to an account can’t get back in.

Can’t get into your mail cuz of internet issues. Hope you had a backup

Too much space used? Make a backup, cleanup and continue

Thunderbird and Mail service exports for me.

You're right not to trust cloud providers with your life's history. They are not trustworthy.

Thunderbird is a great way to back up emails. You can tell it to store everything locally. It stores everything in handy sqlite tables under the covers.

Seeing people in this thread say that they delete all their emails is super weird. I'd like to know their job titles, ages, etc. Do they not use email to converse with their lawyers, business associates, etc.?

What's your favorite email search tool?

Ideally something that runs against a local archive on PC, and has a mobile app. With instant results.

I used to use Lookout (for Outlook) and have never managed to find something as fast, simple and reliable.

I can recommend https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup for backing up gmail.

I use https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back for gmail

I use fetchmail, I've used OfflineIMAP before and MailDrop locally to autorefile anything since I use my mails locally (notmuch-emacs), in the past I've used OfflineIMAP also to restore mails on a third party IMAPs.

Essentially they are just a set of maildirs on my homeserver backed up with the rest, muchsync over SSH allow to have messages on multiple computers (actually just desktop and laptop).

I use mpop with a local mailbox file ~/Mail/inbox and mutt as the mua (so no fancy archive hierarchy), cleared annually and copied to a file named like ~/Mail/inbox.2024, searchable with grep, backed up remotely in encrypted tar files on backblaze with passwords committed to memory, locally on a zfs file server, and annually on dvd for at least a decade in case all my hardware gets fried.

I use synology mail server to pull emails from cloud provider. I can use it as backup interface and if needed can switch my email domain to local without losing anything and without need to restore mails from backup.

I use Thunderbird and just back up my home directory.

I backup my mail server and with that all email every day, keeping archives for the last 7 days, the last 4 weeks and the last 3 months. I have an email archive going back to 1992, from 1997 it is directly available in MUAs, older messages are in offline archives.

I just use thunderbird with imap and copy the whole thunderbird folder to a new device when I want to use email there.

That being said, I started using email about twenty years ago and I probably have looked at past emails maybe a dozen times. The vast majority I never look at again.

Personal no. But professional, yes.

Whenever I change jobs I always take a copy of all my emails and keep it in offline storage.

Arguably not always legal/compliant. But both for CYA, learned history, relevant contacts etc. it has had use for me in multiple occasions in the past

I download all of my mail from POP3 accounts, then I backup my Thunderbird directory: one copy on my home server, one encrypted copy to a VPS in another country. I use duplicity for that. One full backup every 2 weeks, then incrementals.

Yes. In Gmail I set up a label for the year which is added to every email. Then I download them periodically because Takeout lets you choose just a label, so I only end up with a years worth max. I have emails going back to the 90s. Why not?

Yes. My devices retrieve email from a cheap VPS where cron periodically runs tar gz on $HOME/Maildir. scp then retrieves the backup. I use GMail for SMTP but all outgoing mail is copied to the IMAP server on the VPS.

I am using neomutt + mbsync that gets rsynced to my backup server once a week.

I have about 11 years archived as annual maildir tarballs. I archive using thunderbird and export them when I remember to. I don't know why I bother, I almost never need anything from them.

I've never viewed emails as important enough to keep in general, though I pay for my email sevice. Anything important I'll back up individually. But mostly I delete straight away.

I self-host my email, and I backup my server. My Gmail account, which I seldom use, gets redirected to an address at my own server, so it automatically gets backed up as well.

What is the best format for email back up, so that it can be read decades in the future?

I once had a four year overdue reminder to setup gmail backups, still haven't set it up.

yes, I run a local mail server on my nas/server, and sync from online accounts every few months, and also keep local backup via syncing with Thunderbird

I use Gmail and just download a Google takeout every 3 months

Um, I back up EVERYTHING, like any sane person? And, like any other sane person, I self-host (on a server that's obviously backed up), and keep at least one copy of my email on my main working computer (which is also obviously backed up), so I don't have to do anything email-specific to make that happen.

Yeah. Email server's whole filesystem gets synced to my backup server, and the mbox files or whatever are in there somewhere.

> what tools are you using to backup your emails?

rsync and btrfs snapshots

> Is there a service which takes care of this automatically?

Cron?