mail backup solution?

[Norberto Meijome]

On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 10:38:47 -0500
Mike Jeays <mj001 at rogers.com> wrote:

re. server side backup, 
 a) if you can't have shell access to the box, rsync is kind of out of
the question
 b) If your mail is hosted alongside your website, which is managed by
one of the many control panels (cpanel, plesk, ensim), you should be
able to generate a backup via the control panel interface. YMMV
 c) Do a backup from your local copy (after doing a download all msgs,
which should still leave the mails in the server) - see below for how I
do it
 d) Perl + some IMAP module to download each email and back it up? I
dont see how this would be any better than c) really.

> 
> Using Evolution, I made a tar backup of the .evolution directory, and
> copied it to another machine.  It came nowhere close to working
> properly, 

maybe your local copy of emails (aka imapcache) is located elsewhere?)

> and was about as annoying to work with as Outlook

those that try to imitate a product will probably suffer some of the
same issues, imho

>. It
> behaved just like a proprietary product with mysterious file formats,
> even though the mailbox files themselves seem to be clean mboxes.  It
> must keep configuration data hidden somewhere else.  I am pretty well
> fed up with the product, and may switch to Thunderbird.
 
interestingly enough, I recently switched from Thunderbird to
sylpheed-claws. I know it's probably not so active, but it seems a lot
more powerful, and it supports MH (working on getting the Maildir
plugin to compile properly). It (sylpheed-claws) reminds me of good old
XFMail, which I had used for a long while before Thunderb.

FWIW, I have 9 email accounts (a few with different identities). Work
related email is from an Exchange server - I tried Evolution + its
exchange plugin and it just wouldnt work, so I moved on.
Anyway, Work's IMAP cache is a symlink to a subdir in my GELI disk
(this is a laptop after all). Work's local copies are also in the GELI
disk.

For backing up on the client side, I simply rsync to another box my
~/.sylpheed-claws, my GELI md device and the tar ball of the local
copy my  non-work emails (faster than transferring thousands of
individual mails - MH format...). This is part of my laptop backup
script (could be using dump, but i only need a small portion of the
filesystem... setting nodump in most of the box is rather silly)


> Or have I failed to understand something?

maybe u should start by reading the config file and following through
with each path mentioned,etc... it worked for me (tm) for 
Thunderbird, (FFox) and sylpheed

good luck,
Beto