PopBak - Backup Your Email
Popbak allows you to backup your emails to text files, even saving the attachments with the text.
Honestly, we were planning on releasing this Popbak after we created a gui and made it more user friendly, but with the recent G-Archive debate (see CodingHorror, and Techcrunch). We thought we would release it into the wild and finish it later.
If you find Popbak useful, consider supporting us...
Using the script
Popbak is currently run from the command line and requires Python (ours is Python 2.5) to be installed.
When you have unzipped Popbak, you can run it with this command...
>> python popbak.py -u USERNAME -p PASSWORD -s SERVER -o PORT
So, to backup your gmail account, you would use this command, make sure POP access is activated...
>> python popbak.py -u example@gmail.com -p PASSWORD -s pop.gmail.com -o 995
Notes
Gmail only lets you grab around 300 emails with each connection, so Popbak will connect, download as many emails as it can, disconnect and then sleep for 5 seconds, then re-connect and download more emails. The script will keep doing this till it can't download any more emails (or it errors out).
Since we don't get many unicode emails, we can't vouch for the unicode support of the script. If you make modifications to the script to beef up unicode support, please send it to us so we can update this page and give you credit.
Popbak will create a folder with the curent date and the email address used to access the POP account, this folder will contain all the emails/files Popbak saves, organized by email sender.
History
We originally wrote Popbak because we wanted to backup our gmail account to text files (none of this mbox, etc. crap) so we could archive our emails and never have to worry about finding a program to open them. We couldn't find a suitable script (glad we didn't try G-Archiver) anywhere on the internet so we wrote this one. We made it general so you can backup (hopefully) any pop mailbox with minimum effort. Though we have only tested it on Gmail accounts.
Contact
You can send any questions, comments, and improvements to labs@noopsi.com