Sounds like a great service. Then I went to use it... it doesn't backup email?! I got my contacts and some random stuff that I didn't know I had (and don't care about). But where's my couple of gigs of email? Is there a different service for that?
I should say Thunderbird. Its IMAP implementation has always had issues downloading large volumes of mail for me.
I also live in an area where latency is normally measured in seconds, so I think you and everyone downvoting me are living in a slightly different Internet from me.
Heliotrope sounds like it might offer a good alternative without a six hour journey back to civilization.
Why would you use TB for backups? Use something designed for the job, like offlineimap. Well, or Heliotrope, which is brilliant (Sup, the other project by the same author is brilliant too, but it doesn't download, just reads a maildir).
i'm just saying that it's not the same order of problem as not having the mail at all. also, the majority of my tags are applied using filter rules, which are relatively easy to duplicate on an offline archive.
I'd say it's a bigger order of problem than not having the mail at all. I have mounds of inadequately organized information. I don't want to add to the amount of noise I have to sort through.
I checked out google takeout - but it only lets me backup the services I don't care about. Google for imapgrab. It's a tiny python program and it's as simple as can get.
Reading this link gave me the push I needed to finally backup my gmail. I've been worried about the [probably very low] risk of Google deciding to close my account, but I'm going to take it into my own hands now, and start using Gmail as my reader only.
Not at all, it's utterly trivial with something like OfflineIMAP. Of course, depending on the size of your mailbox it'll take a little while for the first synchronisation but after that it's incremental.
