Description
This program is aimed to backup and restore of your GMail mailbox.
You will need to activate the IMAP access to your mailbox, to do so,
please open your GMail settings and under POP/IMAP tab activate this
option.
The messages are stored in the local directory in files which names
follow the format YYYYMMDD-hhmmss-nn.eml where YYYY is the year, MM the
month number, DD is the day number, hh are hours, mm are minutes and ss
are seconds when the e-mail was SENT. For the case there is more emails
with the same timestamp there is the number nn which starts with value
1. Label assignment is stored in the file labels.txt which is the plain
text file and it pairs the emails stored in the file described above
with the assigned labels.
Examples:
To perform full backup of your GMail account into directory dir, use:
gmail-backup.exe backup dir user@gmail.com password
To specify time interval, you can add additional date specification
in the format YYYYMMDD. The second date can be ommited in which case the
backup is from the first date to now:
gmail-backup.exe backup dir user@gmail.com password 20070621 20080101
You can do multiple backups into the same directory. The labels.txt
is updated according the new e-mails not in the previous backup.
To restore your backup use the restore command. To restore your GMail
account from the previous backup in the directory dir, use for example:
gmail-backup.exe restore dir user@gmail.com password
You can also use the extra feature of GMail backup. It allows the
user to completely clear his mailbox (for example if the user wants to
end using the GMail). All messages are permanently deleted (of course
the email can be stored somewhere deep in the Google company). To do so,
execute the command:
gmail-backup.exe clear user@gmail.com password
The program will ask you to repeat the username, so you have the chance to cancel your mistake.
Note
If your internet provider does not allow you access the IMAP ports in
the internet, than you will not be able to download the emails from
GMail.
) packages installed. It also requires the
module, it should be included in the Python 2.5 distribution. For
earlier versions of Python you can find the package in the repositories
of your distribution.
