backMail

A simple Mail backup solution

Requirements

• Ruby 3.4.5+
• any shell and terminal
• an email account to back up accessible via IMAP (+SSL)

Install

For macOS, GNU Linux and *BSD

1. Download and extract a release
2. From the extracted download folder, run bundle install
3. (Optional) Add backMail to your path
4. Done

For Windows (soon)

1. Download, extract and install a release
2. Done

Usage

From a terminal, run (change the path to backMail according to your situation):

./backMail -e your@email.com -p 'your password' -s imap-server.email.com

Note: only email, password and imap_server are mandatory values.

You can run ./backMail -h to display the help, there is many more options to discover

You can set an account config file using a YAML file instead of using command lines options. The file should be like:

email: "your-email@example.com"
password: "your-password"
imap_server: "imap.example.com"
imap_port: 993
output_dir: "/path/to/output/dir"

Note: Again, only email, password and imap_server are mandatory values.

Security Note: there is a password in this files, so, pay attention where you upload it and to prevent leak, this file should be read/write (even better, this file can be read only) only for the user who run this app. You can achieve this under macOS, GNU Linux and *BSD by changing the permission like chmod go-rwx my_config_file.yaml.

Advanced usage

If you want to back up multiple accounts, you can create multiple config file, one per account and create a cron task to automate this process.

Example with this two accounts: account_1@example.com and account_2@example.com, assuming backMail is installed and in your PATH.

1. Create two YAML config files:

   • One named account_1.yaml

     email: "account_1@example.com"
     password: "super secured password"
     imap_server: "imap.example.com"

   • The other named account_2.yaml

     email: "account_2@example.com"
     password: "another secured password"
     imap_server: "imap.example.com"

2. And create two cron task

   • Task for account_1.yaml, every day at 5 pm: echo "0 17 * * * backMail -c ~/.config/account_1.yaml" | crontab -
   • Task for account_2.yaml, every day, every 5 minutes, with logs output into a file: echo "*/5 * * * * backMail -c ~/another/random/path/account_2.yaml >> ~/.local/share/backMail_account_2.log 2>&1" | crontab -

TODO

• Add a toggle to disable save of attachments
• Add shell completion (BASH, zsh, fish, powershell)
• Add a man page
• Add examples and documentation here 🤦‍♂️