Here is the simplest solution I found to taking a backup of your gmail. The only glitch is that the mirror account will of course be a perfect image only if you set up the forwarding from day one :-(
I had to use gmvault (gmvault.org/) to make a copy of my gmail; it was quite doable.
"Create some backup accounts — This one is so obvious I’m always surprised to hear that not everyone does it. Gmail is free and lets you have an unlimited number accounts… so open a second one. Mine is just my usual account with .bak appended to the username. Once that’s set up, login to your primary account and either enable forwarding for all messages (Settings >> Forwarding and POP/IMAP) or create filters to only forward the messages you really care about. Then just send those messages on to the backup account.
I use my main Gmail account to manage five e-mail addresses, so I used the filters method and only back up a couple of them (the others are already backed up on the original domain’s mail server). I also have the forwarding set up to pass messages along to a Yahoo Mail account, an account on my own server and even a good old Hotmail account (or Windows Live Mail as it’s known these days).
This setup is like a good investment portfolio, think of it as e-mail diversification — your’re hedging your bets by spreading your mail around to several servers. If something goes wrong on one account, just login to another.
I don’t login to the other accounts much, so they aren’t as carefully filtered, organized and de-spammed as my main Gmail account, but at least my mail is there"
Thanks for sharing. In the case of GMVault, how "important" do you think your email needs to be for you to use something like that, as opposed to using Google's solution when it comes out? Or asked in a different way, what do you feel GMVault could offer which regularly archiving emails using the Google solution can't?
I used GMVault only because Google's solution was not out there at that time. However, as others have mentioned, GMVault works on an incremental basis after the first download, while the Google solution seems to be a snapshot-only service (not 100% sure yet).
By the way, my first download with GMVault (eml format, each email separately gzipped up because I did not read the command line options properly) was : 22900 mails which took up 2 GB of disk space.
You can automate gmvault to snag everything and then just do daily/weekly syncs instead of manually having to remember to go to a website every once in a while and download everything each time.
I had to use gmvault (gmvault.org/) to make a copy of my gmail; it was quite doable.
Pasted from http://www.webmonkey.com/2008/11/simple_solutions_to_help_yo...
"Create some backup accounts — This one is so obvious I’m always surprised to hear that not everyone does it. Gmail is free and lets you have an unlimited number accounts… so open a second one. Mine is just my usual account with .bak appended to the username. Once that’s set up, login to your primary account and either enable forwarding for all messages (Settings >> Forwarding and POP/IMAP) or create filters to only forward the messages you really care about. Then just send those messages on to the backup account.
I use my main Gmail account to manage five e-mail addresses, so I used the filters method and only back up a couple of them (the others are already backed up on the original domain’s mail server). I also have the forwarding set up to pass messages along to a Yahoo Mail account, an account on my own server and even a good old Hotmail account (or Windows Live Mail as it’s known these days).
This setup is like a good investment portfolio, think of it as e-mail diversification — your’re hedging your bets by spreading your mail around to several servers. If something goes wrong on one account, just login to another. I don’t login to the other accounts much, so they aren’t as carefully filtered, organized and de-spammed as my main Gmail account, but at least my mail is there"