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Backing Up an IMAP Folder Tree?

Posted by Cliff on from the taking-it-all-with-you dept.

Jason Weill asks: "After finishing up school, I'm transitioning away from my school-run IMAP e-mail account. During my time, I managed to save thousands of messages in dozens of subfolders in my 'Inbox' hierarchy. Pine lets me save an entire folder to a file easily. Mozilla creates a folder tree when I drag 'Inbox' into a local repository, but none of the messages in the subfolders are downloaded. Opera M2 assimilates all those messages into my collection, but it flattens them all into one giant mess. Are there any scripts or programs that can easily export an entire folder tree to files or import it into a local repository for an e-mail program?"

5 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. imapxfer by Alrescha · · Score: 4, Informative

    You might want to try imapxfer from the UW-IMAP toolkit:

    http://www.washington.edu/imap/

    The source for the utilities is at:

    ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/imap-utils.tar .Z

    A.

    --
    ...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
  2. freshmeat.net - search for IMAP copy by pbulteel73 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Just found this... don't know how well it works, but it looks like it does what you want.

    IMAP Copy

  3. isync (not the apple program) by Drakon · · Score: 2, Informative

    apt-get install isync
    pkg_add -r isync

    or go to
    http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~me/isync/

    --
    Buttsex.
  4. there's lots of options... by obi · · Score: 3, Informative

    searching in my debian repo, I find:

    offlineimap - IMAP/Maildir synchronization and reader support

    http://gopher.quux.org:70/devel/offlineimap/

    isync - synchronize a local maildir with a remote IMAP4 mailbox

    http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~me/isync/

  5. Just use Netscape/OE and change offline settings by nyamada · · Score: 3, Informative

    In both OE and Netscape, you can change your preferences to save messages for "offline" viewing. If you do this, you can transfer all your IMAP folder messages to your computer that way. Prepare to wait awhile, if you've really got hundreds of messages.

    If you use NS, I think they're saved in mbox format. In any case, you then have them locally and can archive them from there (or transfer them to your new IMAP server).