gmail-safe

Quick Start

First, be sure to install node and redis. Once that's done:

$ npm install -g gmail-safe
$ gmail_safe ./download/directory -u USERNAME -p PASSWORD --incremental

The specified directory will be created with the 0770 permission code if it does not already exist, and the database will be initialized if it does not yet exist.

About

gmail_safe was inspired by a desire to back up my Google Mail. I surveyed some of the options already available but could find none that met all my criteria:

• Run decently fast
• Support incremental backup
• Can be run in the background (eg. from a cron script)
• Save thread information (Google Mail 'conversations')
• Save Google Mail labels
• and Save attachments & alternate bodies in the standard email format

gmail_safe does all that, and it does it fast (I get about 20 emails per second) and without using much CPU or RAM. Perfect for a cron job.

It achieves that speed using a local redis database to store metadata like conversations and labels, while storing emails in the common format to flat files, one per email. At the moment, the metadata isn't used by anything, but I plan on implementing some sort of export utility at some point. If you have a use case for exporting this metadata (perhaps to re-import your emails to Google Mail or a similar service) let me know and I'll build it for you!

Installation

Currently gmail_safe has two external dependencies you will need to install yourself:

• Node.js 0.6.x
• Redis 2.4 or higher

If there is much demand I will probably make available a more complete guide for installing these dependencies - but really, it isn't very hard.

From there, just follow the quick start guide.

Note: be sure to install gmail_safe using npm install -g gmail-safe - without the -g (which tells npm to install the gmail_safe executable globally) or the environment will break and gmail_safe will not function. If you know why, please file an issue to help point me in the right direction.

FAQ / Troubleshooting

• Q: Help! I accidentally deleted a file / broke the database / etc.!

  A: No problem! First, delete the meta folder from within the download directory. Then, re-run gmail_safe. It should fix itself just fine, although you may need to delete the emails too just to be sure. Your call.

• Q: How can I run gmail_safe from a cron job?

  A: gmail_safe can be very easily stored as a cron job using the -i and -c FILE options, as well as redirecting the output to /dev/null. (Better logging is a planned feature.) Writing the cron job is beyond the scope of this README, but it isn't hard to do. Here is an example config file:

     {
        "username": "[e-mail]",
        "password": "your_password_OR_app_specific_passphrase"
     }
  

Planned Features

• Better backgrounding support (supress stdout & progress bar)
• Metadata transfer/import

Most of these features are fairly simple to implement - mostly I just need motivation. So if you want this feature (or any other!) just file an issue on github.

Legal Boilerplate

This project is Copyright (c) 2012 Erich Blume <[e-mail]>.

Google and Google Mail are trademarks owned by Google. I am not Google. I do not own these trademarks. Hopefully everyone understands that this modest little app only serves to increase Google Mail's adoption, by whatever small amount.

This project is licensed under the MIT license, which is a permissive open-source license. See the LICENSE file for the full terms of the licensing. If this project didn't come with a LICENSE file, then someone messed up (probably me) and you can get a copy at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php.