Just in case

This morning on my walk up to campus, I passed a girl with purple eye shadow and light red lipstick, and my first thought, inexplicably, was that she reminded me of Gmail labels. There’s no hope for me, is there. :P

But on a more serious note, I got to thinking about Gmail, and how I’d be devastated if something happened and I lost all my e-mail. Yes, I could print it out, but there’s a lot of it. I can export the contact list, which I plan on doing soon (and I also need to get my phone numbers out of my cell phone and into a more permanent medium), but that only solves part of the problem.

Why oh why can’t Gmail offer a backup solution?

It would probably be hard on their servers to allow you to download your whole inbox (I’m using 1.5 gigs right now, which would take a while to download), so that might not work. But heck, I’d willingly pay to have Google burn my mail to DVD every month (or whenever I order it) and send it to me. That would definitely be worth it. Whether it’s in the stars or not is another question. But please, Google? Please?

A good backup solution for the email side of gmail is offlineimap (http://software.complete.org/offlineimap)

Earlier this year, Google announced a backup plan for Gmail called Gmail Paper. More information is here: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html

Byron: Mmm, very interesting. Now I just need to install DarwinPorts on my Mac. And one of these days I need to get GML working so I can upload all my old mbox archives…

M: Not to steal your thunder, but I actually blogged about it the day it came out. ;)

Ah, blast, so far behind.
That was the one April Fool’s Day prank I fell for, because I wanted it so bad. E wanted a full paper back-up of emails (I don’t know, she really hates trees) so it was perfect. But then reality hit like an anvil on a coyote.

I set my Gmail account for forward all email to another imap account and keep a copy on Gmail in the archive. This is an easy way to keep a backup of every email I get.

M: Yeah, I fell for it too, and hard. I would love love love to have Google send me full paper back-ups of my e-mails. (Even though I don’t really have anywhere to put them!) But alas, ’tis not to be.

Joseph: Does it work for e-mails you send, too?

Most email clients will allow you to automatically BCC yourself on each email you send out. If you did that then sent email would go into your archive and be forwarded.

So do you use Gmail as your client, or do you use some other desktop-based IMAP client?

I use the Mail.app on Mac OS X.

Hmm. I use Gmail as my main client, since half the time I’m not at my home computer (and I’m on a Mac Mini, not a laptop). Hmm…