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 In some cases, you can get outdated emails resp.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!

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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).

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!

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

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!

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?

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"?

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 important gmail Chats, thank you.

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 address/label would be most useful :)

Hi,
This is a fantastic program! Exactly what I was looking for.
The following new features would be fantastic:
1) As several others have mentioned, keep labels for messages. This can be done with folders for each label and the labeled messages inside. Granted, this means multiply labeled messages are saved twice, I think most people would prefer that to no labels at all.
2) Have a one click option for scheduling a daily backup. This would really be golden--I could set it once and be done with it.
Thanks!

First off this is a great program.

I recently ran into an issue where my new iPhone synced the contact on the phone with the ones in gmail and wiped every contact i had in gmail out. It would be nice to backup the contacts list. There is currently a way to do it in gmail but it would be nice if it was included in this application.

I did a backup, and then restored to a differenct gmail account. I'm impressed by the speed of the backup.

I'd pay good money for this program if it also did an Export(backup)and Import of the Contacts.

Some support for folders would also be nice: either backup of selected folders or retaining the folders on a restore operation.

Excellent otherwise.

Works great and what I was looking for.

I would love to set and forget, say backup inclemently every night, or is someone able to advise in detail how this could be done through Scheduled Task.

Backing up contacts would also be nice

Thanks and regards.

it would be nice if this we were able to choose not to download emails with attachments.

i have on single email with 5mb (with 20 jpg files attached) .
I don't want to backup it but unfortonely i don't have this option.

Mateus Zica.

Back up by label would be very helpful

Unless I'm missing something, the log produced during backup / restore is not automatically saved (?).
I've been cutting and pasting to keep a record of the backup/restore process, but it would be nice if it were produced automatically.

Also, it would be good if the start and finish date / time were to be logged.

Is it possible to "Gmail Backup" create new folders, named by labels, and save them in destination folder?

I have a large Gmail account ( > 4GB) and an unreliable internet connection. It took me several days to restore an account, reconnecting (manually) a few times.

When it restored the emails, the client then restored labels for *only those emails restored during this session* - i.e. something like the last three months of mail (out of four years).

Therefore I would like to see an option to restore the labelings of emails without having to re-upload the emails themselves.

1 - Add me to the list of people who would like to see contacts added to the backup/restore (and an option to just backup/restore those would be nice for folks trying to sync contacts across multiple accounts)
2 - I know your App is called "gmail-backup" but it'd be nice if you could expand it to include Google Docs and Voice (perhaps call it "gCloud-backup", it sounds like people woud PAY for that).

I want to do back up of chats as well as email. Is that feature supported ?

yes please!

Instead of backing up all 18000 of my emails, I'd like to be able to choose only specifically labelled important emails like 'Starred' or 'Backup'.

Just print every 10th one or some optional number so you don't slow down program waiting on i/o to the screen. Does it have to start at the beginning every time? I have several gigabytes of messages so it take a long time to scan from the beginning and printing out the scan messages before starting the download. Even specifying a start date didn't help as it seems to scan the whole file from the beginning, be nice to skip this or speed it up somehow.

Rick

It's been a while now since Google's been supporting nested labels, which make use of "/" character. Is it possible to add support to that character on labels backup?

I think it should make a backup and extend the profile (to add a photo as an example)

I can not use this program until you extend the number of characters supported in labels to include things like ä and ø. So please consider extending this making the program usable to others than English native speakers.

The software saves a file with hour and date of download time. What about set the date with the original email date/time?

Thanks for this program, I used it in Win and Mac.