PUBLIC MARKS from camel with tags backup & gmail

getmail is a mail retriever designed to allow you to get your mail from one or more mail accounts on various mail servers to your local machine for reading with a minimum of fuss. getmail is designed to be secure, flexible, reliable, and easy-to-use. getmail is designed to replace other mail retrievers such as fetchmail. getmail version 4 includes the following features: * simple to install, configure, and use * retrieve virtually any mail o support for accessing mailboxes with the following protocols: POP3 POP3-over-SSL IMAP4 IMAP4-over-SSL SDPS (Demon UK's extensions to POP3) o support for single-user and domain mailboxes o retrieve mail from an unlimited number of mailboxes and servers o can remember which mail it has already retrieved, and can be set to only download new messages * support for message filtering, classification, and annotation by external programs like spam filters and anti-virus programs * support for delivering messages to different destinations based on the message recipient * reliability o native safe and reliable delivery support for maildirs and mboxrd files, in addition to delivery through arbitrary external message delivery agents (MDAs) o does not destroy information by rewriting mail headers o does not cause mail loops by doing SMTP injection, and therefore does not require that you run an MTA (like qmail or sendmail) on your host * written in Python, and therefore easy to extend or customize o a flexible, extensible architecture so that support for new mail access protocols, message filtering operations, or destination types can be easily added o cross-platform operation; getmail 4 should work on Unix/Linux, Macintosh, and other platforms. Windows support available under the free Cygwin package. * winner of various software awards, including DaveCentral's "Best of Linux"

I really like Gmail, but I also like having backups of my data just in case. Here’s how to use a simple program called getmail on Unix to backup your Gmail or Google Apps email. We’ll break this into four steps.