Back up Gmail with fetchmail

While I love the convenience and features of Gmail, I hate that all my messages live on Google's servers. Without a local copy, if I can't get online, or if Gmail has an outage, my email's inaccessible.

While it's possible to download your Gmail with a POP client like Thunderbird, constantly running a program just to backup your email consumes CPU cycles and memory.

Instead, today we'll set up a nightly automated Gmail backup using the command line program fetchmail, which will go out, grab your newest messages, save 'em to your hard drive and exit, all while you sleep soundly in the knowledge that you've got an offline copy of your important email.
REQWhile I love the convenience and features of Gmail, I hate that all my messages live on Google's servers. Without a local copy, if I can't get online, or if Gmail has an outage, my email's inaccessible.

While it's possible to download your Gmail with a POP client like Thunderbird, constantly running a program just to backup your email consumes CPU cycles and memory.

Instead, today we'll set up a nightly automated Gmail backup using the command line program fetchmail, which will go out, grab your newest messages, save 'em to your hard drive and exit, all while you sleep soundly in the knowledge that you've got an offline copy of your important email. >>READ MORE