Late last week GoDaddy finally pushed me over the edge… I just couldn’t take it anymore. I’m all for combatting spam… I really am, but when 60% plus of the emails sent to me bounce as spam\/virus something has gone dreadfully awry.<\/p>\n
So, I had to search for a new email hosting provider – and while I was at it I could right one of the major (non-email bounce) issues I had with GoDaddy – no IMAP support.<\/p>\n
I reviewed several options… and came to the conclusion that Google Apps (for MY domain) would be the right choice. I only had one serious issue with this. I wanted gmail to provide my IMAP store. The challenge? How to migrate 20 accounts with all of the associated IMAP folders and emails to gmail.<\/p>\n
Turns out there is no simple answer unless you opt for a premier account with Google – which will run you $50\/user\/year. The premier account has an IMAP migration tool (but no backup… keep reading). But here is what I settled on:<\/p>\n
imapsync<\/a> would handle moving my current IMAP store to Gmail. To save you some time here is the full command I used:<\/p>\n \/usr\/local\/imapsync\/imapsync –syncinternaldates –host1 <my_imap_server> –user1 <username> –ssl1 –password1 <pwd> –host2 imap.gmail.com –port1 993 –port2 993 –ssl2 –user2 <gmail user> –password2 <gmail pwd> –prefix2 ‘[Gmail]\/’<\/p>\n Now that I had all of the old email moved to Gmail I only had one other issue… What if Gmail “went away”.<\/p>\n Minor Tanget:<\/p>\n An associate of mine said “You don’t have to worry about it… Google will never go away. Backing up Google is silly.” – to which I respond:<\/p>\n Isn’t that what we thought about aol?<\/p>\n End of Tangent.<\/p>\n So I needed to find a solution that would allow me to keep all of my Gmail IMAP folders and emails copied in a reasonably secure way – ensuring that if I ever needed to move away from Gmail I could without losing anything.<\/p>\n Initially, I tried imapsync again to sync my Gmail data back down to my IMAP server. This, however, was not practical. imapsync’s primary attribute is not speed. It is not a high speed backup\/sync solution… it is a bullet-proof solution. That made it:<\/p>\n I also looked at offlineimap<\/a> (which I had looked at for the initial migration as well… but it has no ability to “dry run”- which was too big a chance to take). The advantage of offlineimap is that it “syncs” your IMAP to a Maildir (which – conveniently is my dovecot IMAP server’s file structure). This makes it much faster than doing IMAP to IMAP synchronization. Here are some other advantages:<\/p>\n NOTE: Why wasn’t I concerned about no “dry run”? Because I was creating a backup of the GMail IMAP folders and emails in a simple directory on my server. If the run went bad… just delete the directory and try again. I was also certain I had told offlineimap NOT to delete or expunge anything from my GMail account.<\/p>\n Again, to save you some time, here is my offlineimap config file:<\/p>\n [general]<\/p>\n accounts = brian.cosinity, brian.brianandkelly, brian.briantroy<\/p>\n metadata = \/etc\/offlineimap\/.offlineimap<\/p>\n maxsyncaccounts = 3<\/p>\n ui = Noninteractive.Basic<\/p>\n [Account brian.cosinity]<\/p>\n localrepository = Local.brian.cosinity<\/p>\n remoterepository = brian.cosinity.gmail<\/p>\n autorefresh = 120<\/p>\n quick = 10<\/p>\n [Repository Local.brian.cosinity]<\/p>\n type = Maildir<\/p>\n localfolders = \/u02\/gmail-imap-backups\/brian.cosinity<\/p>\n [Repository brian.cosinity.gmail]<\/p>\n folderfilter = lambda foldername: foldername not in [‘[Gmail]\/All Mail’]<\/p>\n type = IMAP<\/p>\n remotehost = imap.gmail.com<\/p>\n remoteuser = <gmail_account><\/p>\n remoteport = 993<\/p>\n ssl = yes<\/p>\n remotepass = <gmail_password><\/p>\n [Account brian.briantroy]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n localrepository = Local.brian.briantroy\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n remoterepository = brian.briantroy.gmail\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n autorefresh = 120quick = 10\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n [Repository Local.brian.briantroy]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n type = Maildir\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n localfolders = \/u02\/gmail-imap-backups\/brian.briantroy\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n \n folderfilter = lambda foldername: foldername not in [‘[Gmail]\/All Mail’]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n type = IMAP\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n remotehost = imap.gmail.com\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n remoteuser = <gmail_account>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n remoteport = 993\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n ssl = yes\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n remotepass = <gmail_password>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n [Account brian.brianandkelly]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n localrepository = Local.brian.brianandkelly\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n remoterepository = brian.brianandkelly.gmail\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n autorefresh = 120\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n quick = 10\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n [Repository Local.brian.brianandkelly]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n type = Maildir\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n localfolders = \/u02\/gmail-imap-backups\/brian.brianandkelly\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n [Repository brian.brianandkelly.gmail]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n folderfilter = lambda foldername: foldername not in [‘[Gmail]\/All Mail’, ‘[Gmail]\/System Email’]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n type = IMAP\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n remotehost = imap.gmail.com\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n remoteuser = <gmail_account>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n remoteport = 993\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n ssl = yes\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n remotepass = <gmail_password>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What this does is backup 3 gmail accounts (brian.cosinity, brian.briantroy, and brian.brianandkelly) to \/u02\/gmail-imap-backup\/<folder>. These accounts are backed up every 120 minutes. Also, every 10th sync is a full sync – so only once per day (every 20 hours) does offlineimap fully sync the accounts – the other syncs are “quick”. Late last week GoDaddy finally pushed me over the edge… I just couldn’t take it anymore. I’m all for combatting spam… I really am, but when 60% plus of the emails sent to me bounce as spam\/virus something has gone dreadfully awry. So, I had to search for a new email hosting provider – and… Continue reading The great IMAP migration…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,31],"tags":[142,143],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\n [Repository brian.briantroy.gmail]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nYou can check out the offlineimap wiki<\/a> for more information about each directive in this config file.
\nThis solution works for me. If you are looking for true dual synchronized IMAP servers you would have to go a bit further that what I’ve done here.
\nNow – with any luck – Google Gmail will never go down and I’ll never need any of this… but I’ll sleep better knowing it is there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"