On 03/10/2015 01:53 PM, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> On 03/10/2015 08:11 AM, Steven Haigh wrote:
>> Apologies if I've jumped in part way and missed something - but
>> fetchmail should do this?
> fetchmail is designed to download from IMAP and inject into the local MTA.  So
> perhaps not what is desired here.
>
>
Thank all of you for the suggestions.  I do not have access to a SMTP 
server (e.g., a sendmail server) with IMAP; all primary services for our 
zone (except for research servers such as compute engines, data stores, 
and the like -- but all DNS, SMTP/IMAP, OSPF/RIP/BGP, etc., are not 
ours, and our current HTTP server may soon be shutdown and we will be 
forced to use whatever server the administrative computing entity 
demands) are now demanded by the campus Information Security Officer to 
be under the control of the campus administrative computing entity that 
is not part of academic affairs.  The administrative computing entity 
outsources as much as it can, and uses vendor staff to address and solve 
most "major" problems as well as to "assist" (that is, do) systems 
configurations.  Almost all of the "servers" used by the administrative 
computing entity are VMWare licensed virtual architectures, typically 
supporting multiple instances of some version of a MS server.

All of the workstations over which I have root access have VirtualBox 
and as all of these are X86-64, a licensed copy of MS Windows 7 Pro 
(soon to move to 10, skipping 8x, unless 10 proves to be as awkward as 
8x) under VirtualBox, and then MS Windows only applications thereunder 
(by MS Windows only, I mean applications that do not exist for Linux 
such as the Adobe applications).   Thus putting together a VirtualBox 
machine is no additional work, and I can run a MS Win application (such 
as has been suggested) to backup IMAP email.

I need an application that will work in practice with an arbitrary MS 
Office email system nominally supporting SMTP and IMAP (but most happy 
with proprietary MS protocols and clients), will produce a complete and 
accurate image of the email that would be visible, including full 
headers, in an application such as Linux Thunderbird, and allow me to 
keep this image on the Linux side of a client workstation.  The image 
should be accessible by Linux tools; using the application, the email 
can be restored to the MS server so that it will be accessible to me 
using any IETF standards based client I might have on whatever 
workstation/laptop I have with me (typically, running Linux).  (I 
apologize if some letters are missing -- the keyboard on this laptop is 
failing, and a new laptop has not yet arrived -- a spell checker will 
accept "a" although the intended word is "as").  Note that because of 
campus firewall rules demanded by the Information Security Officer, I 
cannot access my office workstation using ssh, etc. -- I cannot read or 
write files, or execute commands, other than from the console of my 
workstation (not even from another node on campus).  If I need to 
transfer files to my laptop (upon which I am now working), I need to use 
an email server, the campus proprietary virtualized Blackboard system, 
or a removable storage device such as a USB "stick" -- old fashioned 
sneaker-net -- because of the firewall access rules.

Thanks again for all of the suggestions.

Yasha Karant