Backup imap mail by using pop

I am not sure which is the correct forum to post this, so please forgive me if I chose wrong. I have been using imap mail for a long time and would be pretty disappointed if I lost that mail. Someone suggested that I just install a client somewhere that connects through pop, but to configure it so that I don't delete messages off the server.

I then installed Thunderbird on my notebook and was able to download everything in my inbox with no problem. None of the subfolders of my inbox were downloaded though. I have gone through all the account settings and don't see anything that looks like it would help me get those folders. I also manually created a folder under my inbox of the same name as one in imap and tried getting messages, but it only appeared to try and get new mail in my inbox.

Can anyone tell me how I can go about getting the mail in subfolders to my pop configured client? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

In reply to:

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Can anyone tell me how I can go about getting the mail in subfolders to my pop configured client? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

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Sorry you weren't fully informed or read documentation on POP. It's not designed to work with subfolders so you will only ever be able to get messages in the Inbox.

I don't get why your friend suggested using a POP client. Doing so alone is not going to backup email messages. In fact, if you are indeed using Thunderbird, then you already have a way to backup messages to your notebook. You should have a "Local Folders" account. Like the name implies, these folders are on your notebook's disk - you can even change the directory. Just drag and drop messages or folders from the remote account's folders to the Local Folders account. I don't use a Mac, but you may have to hold the Cmd key? to perform a copy and paste instead of a cut and paste. Or at least on Windows Ctrl-drag will do a copy and paste.

And you can go a step farther and backup messages to a different mail server (using IMAP) by also using Thunderbird this way. There is a also a utility on DreamHost servers that you can run from shell that will copy or move messages between different accounts and local disk as well.

Thunderbird and many other clients also have a feature for saving messages locally so that you can access them when not connected to the Internet, without the need to manually copy them to a Local Folders account.





openvein.org -//-

Thanks for the quick response. I didn't realize my post suggested I was using a mac. My main machine is Ubuntu, but I have been using this IMAP without downloading on many different machines.

I came to the realization about POP and it's lack of folder support once I tried. After that I looked into transferring mail by downloading locally from IMAP. After that a little Googling helped me to figure out how to transfer files from one machine to another.

I think I got it now, but thanks again.