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  • Citadel? Courier? Cyrus? Dovecot? - I just want to backup my emails

    From Markus Robert Kessler@3:633/10 to All on Fri Jan 2 10:00:00 2026
    Hi everyone

    and happy new year!

    I am in contract with a webhoster, having webserver, email and a few other things.

    But, there is no way to backup my emails stored on their imap server.
    Meaning, when anything happens to that infrastructure (or they go broke)
    then all my emails are gone.

    So, I'd like to mirror them via imapsync to a local instance of some imap server, and then pack them together as a tgz archive.

    Now I see, that there are several solutions out, see subject, and I don't
    know which one fits best and what component is needed.

    Does anyone have some experience here? Do I need an mta (exim for
    instance) to just sync emails from external imap server to local?

    Thanks for any hint!

    Best regards,

    Markus



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    For private email please use http://www.dipl-ing-kessler.de/email.htm

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Richard Kettlewell@3:633/10 to All on Thu Jan 1 21:42:18 2026
    Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> writes:
    I am in contract with a webhoster, having webserver, email and a few other things.

    But, there is no way to backup my emails stored on their imap server. Meaning, when anything happens to that infrastructure (or they go broke) then all my emails are gone.

    So, I'd like to mirror them via imapsync to a local instance of some
    imap server, and then pack them together as a tgz archive.

    Now I see, that there are several solutions out, see subject, and I
    don't know which one fits best and what component is needed.

    Dovecot is fairly easy to set up. I?ve not tried the other IMAP servers.

    Does anyone have some experience here? Do I need an mta (exim for
    instance) to just sync emails from external imap server to local?

    I?ve never used imapsync but there?s no reason copying messages from one
    IMAP server to another should require an MTA.

    --
    https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Lawrence D?Oliveiro@3:633/10 to All on Fri Jan 2 10:00:00 2026
    On Thu, 1 Jan 2026 20:19:43 -0000 (UTC), Markus Robert Kessler wrote:

    I am in contract with a webhoster, having webserver, email and a few
    other things.

    But, there is no way to backup my emails stored on their imap
    server.

    I use POP3 for fetching mail from the public-facing server onto my own
    machine. So the only mail store that needs backing up is already under
    my control.

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Computer Nerd Kev@3:633/10 to All on Fri Jan 2 07:43:14 2026
    Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> wrote:
    Hi everyone

    and happy new year!

    I am in contract with a webhoster, having webserver, email and a few other things.

    But, there is no way to backup my emails stored on their imap server. Meaning, when anything happens to that infrastructure (or they go broke) then all my emails are gone.

    So, I'd like to mirror them via imapsync to a local instance of some imap server, and then pack them together as a tgz archive.

    Now I see, that there are several solutions out, see subject, and I don't know which one fits best and what component is needed.

    Personally I'd ignore all those "solutions" as overkill and use
    movemail from GNU Mailutils:

    movemail -v imaps://no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de mh:///home/[user]/Mail

    If you have special characters like '@' in the username, you
    may need to percent-encode them, eg. "%40".

    https://www.mailutils.org/wiki/Fetching_Mail_with_Movemail

    I use MH format for storing the mail, check what format/s your
    email client understands and change "mh://" to suit.

    https://www.mailutils.org/manual/html_node/Local-Mailboxes.html

    I actually use POP to get mail using movemail myself, but it works
    with IMAP too.

    --
    __ __
    #_ < |\| |< _#

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)