Requested features

Here you can request now features to be included into the Gmail Backup. After collecting some requested features which are not already under development, we well create a pool where you can vote for the proposed features. The most voted features will be implemented first. Thanks for your suggestions!

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It would be nice to have a

It would be nice to have a feature which will get, from the local backup, the latest date of your downloaded email. And it will use it for incremental backup. It should by probably an optional command.

I am aware that this solution will not be bullet proof. In some cases, you can get outdated emails resp. new emails with old date.

Thanks!

Good idea

Hi Filip,
it is a very good idea. There could be a threshold which will specify the "overlap" into older emails. The already downloaded emails will be skipped using the feature introduced in the 0.06 release of GMail Backup.

I will try to implement it soon.

Jan

Yes! Good idea

First of all i have just found this app and love it!!! i am going to recommend it to a few blog owners for review.

I agree about the date idea, it would allow users to create incremental backups as a schedule or cron job easily. Which is what i would like to do.

Andrew

Archived Backup and Compressed Backups

Dated Archived Backup

I would like to see a "Dated Archived Backup" this means each
full backup or incremental backup is in a different subdirectory with a date coded directory name. (could also be used with next suggestion e.g. zip files instead of folders). This also means you could keep years and years worth of backups and if something goes wrong selectively restore only current backups. Personally, I would burn old email backups to cd and store them removing them from my system's backup directory and gmail account keep current emails/backups.

Compressed Backups Check Box.

Zip, bzip or gzip ... any how... Compress Backups so each backup is in one tidy file. Still allows users to manually uncompress and use eml's if they so wish.

Andrew

Multiple Accounts and Profiles

Profiles

Perhaps an accounts details and settings could be stored in a profile. Passwords could therefore be encrypted. In commandline mode you could use the profile name rather than having the username and password for all to see (would be good for scripts and scheduling).

Multiple Accounts

Following on from profile what about Multiple Account support for those of us who use several gmail accounts.

Andrew

Backup and Restore by Tag

List user's tags, allow the user to select the tags to backup / restore.

labels

when restoring my mails (to another account), the originally applied labels are gone!
would be a nice feature if they stayed!

file names

it would be handy if there was an option for generating custom output filenames, in the vein of printf formats (or /bin/date or mp3 taggers, etc) so (using the /bin/date example) I could ask for names of the form

%Y/%m/%Y%m%d-%H%M%S-%?.eml

to get

2008/08/20080810-123456-1.eml

(approximately) that would let me spit the files into different directories for each month. maybe i'm old-school, but i don't like having one directory with thousands of files in it.

Settings Backup

First of all, thinks for the great program.

My suggestion is to allow complete settings backup and restoration.

Although you can't do this with IMAP, and so would require a significant addition to the program, it would no doubt be very useful. If you could backup gmail's settings including filters, labels etc. as well as allow restoration of all your email and settings to a completely different gmail account if necessary this would allow gmail backup to be used as a complete gmail disaster recovery solution.

That way, if one day your account just up an vanishes, you can restore to operation as normal in as short as time as possible.

I haven't tried what was mentioned in post #7, but if he is correct that labels do not get restored when restoring into a different account that would of course be a nice thing to have work.

Backup DRAFTS

Seems there is no backup of the DRAFTS folder?

This would be a really great idea -- especially because this morning I logged onto my Gmail as usual and found ALL of the 50+ emails in my DRAFTS folder had disappeared.

Add email subject to file name

This would make the backup easily searchable by both email clients and desktop search programs.

Minimize button, tray icon, security, and output options

1- First of all, great program.
2- I can't wait for this to be v1.0.
3- A couple things I would love to see-
--A minimize button
--A tray icon/version where you could pause, etc.
--More information about security-
----Is this storing my password?
----Sending to google?
----Encrypted?
----I see it only connects to a google server, but it could be doing other things.
--Output options, I don't really need to see all of the information it outputs. Maybe a minimal option that just has the counters and progress bar.

Good luck!

Security

Hi,
we are not storing the password. In the local file, there are stored only these information: last used username, since date, before date, state of "Newest emails only" checkbox and backup directory. We communicate with GMail using the standard IMAP protocol secured with SSL. So the communication is encrypted. It also connects to our server to download the file http://www.gmail-backup.com/files/version.txt, but since the 0.102 version we do only explicit version checks (by the user request). It is enough or are you interested in more details of our software?

Thank you for suggestions to the new versions, we will implement them in some new version.

Regards,
Jan

Utilizing backed up data in IMAP or Thunderbird

Great program, makes GMail a viable option.

But it would be nice to be able to do something with the backed up mails other than restore them to Google. Eg. restore them to a general IMAP server. Or group them into mail folders for a conventional client such as Thunderbird.

(I know multiple labels cause hard choices.)

Maybe a separate utility.

What does Google think of your application? Now and in the future? They could decide to ban this type of backup.

Is the source available anywhere? Would make us feel more secure. And would be interesting to look at.

I'll donate $10, well done.

Anthony

Yes, restoring to general

Yes, restoring to general IMAP servers is very good idea and we thought about it. But the primary goal is to just backup the emails if something .... The emails are in very accessible format which can be read by MS Outlook and Mozilla Thinderbird, so we hope that someone in desperate need to upload the emails to an account different to Gmail can use another tool.

What Google thinks of our application, we do not know. :-) We are not in touch with them at all. Yes it might happen that this type of backup will be banned.

The source is not available and we do not plan to make it open source.

Thanks for teh donation!

Filip

Consider this

Run as service

Altough there's a way to run your app as a service (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/137890), supporting the service mode natively is wiser since the M$ "method" is shaky. If you ever make the tool a "set it and forget it" app for many users at once, you've got a winner you can sell. Best wishes.

Directory tree

Most file systems don't handle many thousand files in a single directory very well, the backup should be split across subdirectories (1 per year or per month).

Release the source code for this program

Hi,

You seem to have an awesome product in the making here. I've been looking for something to do just this for a very long time and am glad to see one being developed.

However, you might find it a lot faster to develop this product if you release the source code and get many other developers to send you their contributions. I personally would be more than happy to lend a hand.

Keep up the good work!

Labels / Month Folders

hey there,

I think someone already posted this,
but PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE,
add the ability to keep the associated LABELS that were attached with the email. This is essential, if this program is to be of use to me.

Also, i agree with the post about splitting the emails by month once in their destination folder.

This program is a long time coming, so keep up the great work... (if you're lucky google will just buy you out!)

eric

Folder backup

Nice work!

I would like to see a choice of folders to back up. Most of us will have thousands of mails in Gmail. However, I keep the really important stuff that needs to be kept forever in a few important folders. IMAP itself certainly allows you to select a folder to download.
I will be watching here for that feature and be happy to donate when it happens.

thanks

password and local encryption

First question. Is my gmail password stored locally on my computer now that I have entered my information in your application?

And second, it would be nice to have the contents of the .eml file automatically encrypted from prying eyes. I guess I could always use truecrypt to create a drive or folder to store the .eml files.

Thanks for the app. works great!

Labels Restoration? Please

Others voiced their desire to have the labels attached to the emails when RESTORED. I know you create labels.txt file, and this is a great start and maybe hints that there is more to come in this area ...

I thought about how I could restore the labels for my emails and figured out no way so far except manual methods. This is not realistic for 4500+ messages and someone posted he/she backed up accounts with 100,000 messages and 85,000 messages - definitely not realistic to restore labels manually.

Is there a possibility via "private headers fields" in the email which you will insert at backup and then use when you restore?

Label Concern

Scenario: I backed up 1000 emails with 2 different labels (a,b). Next I change labels "a" to "AAA" and "b" to "BBB" on the gmail account. No problems in the account - all the labels change automatically.

Now I back up another 1000 emails. Will the new labels.txt reflect the changes for the first 1000 emails I backed up?

In other words: If I look at the NEW labels.txt in detail will I see labels "a", "b", "AAA" and "BBB" or only "AAA" and "BBB"?

label/folder preservation?

I was really excited to read about a way to back up email on Google. But I don't think this program is practical in this early stage of development. There should definitely be a folder structure that looks the same as what I see for my label structure. For example, all of the email in my orders label should get backed up into a folder called orders on the hard drive.

Please add support for our

Please add support for our important gmail Chats, thank you.

I definitely would love

I definitely would love this.
More and more email is being overtaken by IM/chat, this would be soooo useful.

Great program - only real

Great program - only real shortcoming from my point of view is inability to schedule a backup. This is probably something that can be done in Scheduler but unfortunately it's beyond my expertise.

backup just one email

backup just one email address/label would be most useful :)

security

Hi,
I want raise the security concern.There should be something on our local computer that can made a file which stores all our passwords whom so ever access our account.

Business Opportunities

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