On 07/03/15 00:58, Yasha Karant wrote:
> My department is being forced by the university administrative IT unit
> to MS Office365 distributed server ("cloud") email service, as I have
> communicated in a previous query.  We are now being advised by others
> who have been forced to do this -- but of course not by IT -- to backup
> all of our email.  I use Mozilla Thunderbird, incoming IMAP, outgoing to
> a designated SMTP server.

To speed up my Thunderbird setup many years ago, I installed dovecot +
offlineimap using maildir.  Thunderbird connects to localhost and I just
run offlineimap in the background when I've logged into my networks.
That works quite fine, as offlineimap synchronises mails and folders
both ways.  For outgoing e-mail, I use the corporate SMTP server
directly, as that is usually not the bottle neck.

Having this said, I know Thunderbirds IMAP support have gotten better.
But as my setup have worked so well, it provides me with a guaranteed
copy of all my mail at any time I've stayed on this setup.  If I need
some old stuff, I can easily enough search for it locally, even if I
don't have an Internet connection handy.  And since I'm using IMAP and a
proper maildir setup for "incomming" mails, I'm not even bound to
Thunderbird if I decide to switch to something else.


-- 
kind regards,

David Sommerseth