On 3/9/2015 6:20 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> On 03/07/2015 04:21 PM, Chris Schanzle wrote:
>> 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/
>
> At present, my department chair is suggesting:
>
> http://www.mailstore.com/en/mailstore-home-email-archiving.aspx
>
> that is licensed for free for "home" use -- presumably meaning single 
> user unless one really must work from home for this use.
>
> Note that this application does not support Linux.  Hence, my plan 
> is:  under SL run VirtualBox running MS Win 7 pro running the above 
> application, but save all of the produced files on the Linux "side" 
> using VirtualBox shared folders.  Many of my colleagues here do not 
> use MS Win as the primary OS environment; most use Linux or MacOS X 
> with open system extensions (e.g., fink).  The colleague who suggested 
> the above application is using MS Win on his workstation.
>
> Has anyone had any experience with this sort of scheme or this 
> application?
>
> Yasha Karant

I would just pick something that seems to have merit and _try_ it.  At 
worst, it doesn't do what you intended and you go find something else to 
try.  I am in a similar situation (mail migration) and am planning on 
trying Chris's suggestion of imapsync.

Setting up an entire virtual machine seems a bit overblown for email 
save/restore.  Also, don't get too caught up on the licensing.  If you 
are doing it 1 time for a handful of users, I wouldn't worry too much.  
If you are going to use it on a regular basis, continuously, then the 
licensing becomes much more of an issue.  If you look at the licensing 
plans, you can see it is bracketed by user count and on an annual basis, 
targeted as a long term backup solution.

My advice, if you are using linux, find a linux solution.  There are 
dozens of scripts/programs out there to do this, just pick one and 
experiment.

-Mark