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