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.

Downloading all emails from your Gmail Account every time you want to backup your emails would be a nightmare. In this case it comes in hand the incremental downloading feature of email.

Gmail Backup checks all emails in the Gmail Account whether their are already downloaded. If so than it skips them. It only download emails which are not presented in your local copy. However, the checking emails takes time too.

As result, we recommend to specify the date since you want to download emails. For example:

gmail-backup.exe backup backup xxx@gmail.com passwd 20080101


In the example, I specify that I want do check and eventually download emails since 1 January 2008. Consequently, the process of updating of your backup is much faster.

In a future release, we will add feature which will get, from the local backup, the latest date of your downloaded email. And it will use it for incremental backup. Nonetheless, you must be aware that this solution will not be bullet proof. In some cases, you can get outdated emails resp. new emails with old date.

Your GMail Backup Team