On 03/06/2015 06:58 PM, 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.   I have found
>
> http://www.beyondinbox.com/beyondinbox-download.html
>
> licensed for fee that claims to function under Linux, MacOS X, and MS Windows for this purpose.  There are concerns to find a viable licensed-for-free product that will copy IMAP folders and all of the contents thereof to a local harddrive directory/file structure and that can restore these same IMAP folders and the contents thereof back to a remote IMAP service -- thus guarding against loss -- up to the last backup snapshot -- of all email.
>
> Has anyone any experience with the above application?  is there a licensed for free reliable, viable alternative, GUI preferred, for Linux?
>
> Yasha Karant

I've had good luck with imapsync[1] to make backup copies to another IMAP server.  It's smart and useful for migrating many accounts from one imap service to another, but it's also useful for just syncing one account.

When we migrated to the cloud, I had expectations of the cloud just vaporizing or turning into a thundercloud and taking a dump on us, but it has been OK.  MS hasn't lost any of our mail.  Thunderbird does occasionally re-download all folders on my various systems (fedora, windows, CentOS 6) which takes a long time for my years of email archives due to their throttling (which has vastly improved as well -- use to take a week with many fatal errors while using it normally; now completes in about a day and rarely a failure).  The root cause of this is unknown - could be when they move me to another 'pod' or when they muck with my folders (redownload happened recently when they added "Clutter").

[1] http://imapsync.lamiral.info/