imapbackup3 0.1

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imapbackup3

A Python package for creating full backups of IMAP mailboxes

Installation

python3 -m pip install --user imapbackup3

Command line usage

usage: imapbackup3 [-h] [-y] [-f FOLDERS] [-e] [-k KEY] [-c CERT] -s HOST
                   [-P PORT] -u USER [-p PASSWORD] [-t SECS] [--thunderbird]

Back up E-mail messages from an IMAP server. mbox files are created in the
current working directory.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -y, --yes-overwrite-mboxes
                        Overwite existing mbox files instead of appending
  -f FOLDERS, --folders FOLDERS
                        Specifify which folders use. Comma separated list.
  -e, --ssl             Use SSL. Port defaults to 993.
  -k KEY, --key KEY     PEM private key file for SSL. Specify cert, too.
  -c CERT, --cert CERT  PEM certificate chain for SSL. Specify key, too.
                        Python's SSL module doesn't check the cert chain.
  -s HOST, --server HOST
                        Address of server (without port)
  -P PORT, --port PORT  Server port (defaults to 143 without and 993 with SSL)
  -u USER, --user USER  Username to log into server
  -p PASSWORD, --password PASSWORD
                        Prompts for password if not specified. If the first
                        character is '@', treat the rest as a path to a file
                        containing the password. Leading '' makes it literal.
  -t SECS, --timeout SECS
                        Sets socket timeout to SECS seconds.
  --thunderbird         Create Mozilla Thunderbird compatible mailbox

Python usage

Minimal example (using SSL on port 993):

from imapbackup3 import IMAPBackup
with IMAPBackup(host='mail.example.com', user='myuser', password='mypassword') as imb:
    imb.download_all_messages()

Full example:

from imapbackup3 import IMAPBackup
with IMAPBackup(
    host='mail.example.com',
    user='myuser',
    password='mypassword',
    port=993,
    usessl=True,
    keyfilename='my_key.pem',
    certfilename='my_cert.pem',
    thunderbird=False,
    folders=['INBOX', 'INBOX.Sent']
) as imb:
    imb.download_all_messages()

Background

This package is based on a script by Rui Carmo. Original description:

This was first published around 2007 (probably earlier) on my personal site, and it was originally developed to work around the then rather limited (ok, inconsistent) Mac OS X Mail.app functionality and allow me to back up my old mailboxes in a fully standard mbox format (well, at least as much as mbox can be considered a standard...).

Somewhat to my surprise it was considered useful by quite a few people throughout the years, and contributions started coming in. Given that there seems to be renewed interest in this as a systems administration tool, I'm posting the source code here and re-licensing it under the MIT license.

Features

• ZERO dependencies.
• Copies every single message from every single folder (or a subset of folders) in your IMAP server to your disk.
• Does incremental copying (i.e., tries very hard to not copy messages twice).
• Tries to do everything as safely as possible (only performs read operations on IMAP).
• Generates mbox formatted files that can be imported into Mail.app (just choose "Other" on the import dialog).
• Optionally compresses the result files on the fly (and can append to them).
• Is completely and utterly free (distributed under the MIT license).

Requirements

This package requires Python 3.