Re: Moving from local storage to imap: advice wanted

[Jason Earl]

On Sun, Apr 24 2011, Rasmus Villemoes wrote:

> Hi there
>
> I started using emacs/gnus on my university account around 10 years
> ago. So far, all mail has been pulled from the server and stored
> locally in what I think is Maildir format (each group in Gnus has an
> associated folder under ~/Mail, with one mail per file). Outgoing mail
> and news has been stored in (mbox?) files
> "sent-(mail/news)-yyyy-mm". I have been relying on the university's
> backup of user files in order not to lose mail.

>From what I understand your email could be in nnml format.  Not that I
think that it matters that much.  If Emacs can read it, Emacs can move
it to a new backend.  It might take a while, but your email is probably
safe.

Make sure to get backups before moving, of course.

> But I may not keep that account for ever, and running emacs via an X11
> connection from the other side of the Atlantic is not very
> practical. So I want to find another solution. Naturally, I still want
> to be able to access all my old mail and sent mail/news, which totals
> around 2GB. I suppose I could more or less just copy the ~/Mail
> directory and ~/.gnus from my university account to my laptop and keep
> doing things the same way, but my laptop is too likely to crash or get
> stolen. So I'm looking for a hosting solution offering:
>
> (a) imap access, of course
> (b) automatic backup
> (c) a way to upload all my old messages
> (d) at least 10GB storage
>
> It's not hard to find places offering (a) and (d). (b) is not that
> advertised, but I suppose that it's implicit when offering any kind of
> storage. Also, I think offlineimap may be used to dump snapshots
> periodically. What I'd like to know is if anyone has experience with
> (c). 

One of the things that you might consider is using a combination of an
IMAP server and OfflineIMAP to keep the client machines in sync.  If
your current mailstore really is in maildir format then this would
likely solve both (b) and (c).  You could have a full backup of your
mailstore on your most heavily used machines, and connect to your IMAP
server remotely for rarely used clients or for devices like your phone.

> Somewhat related: Assuming I find such a place, I of course need to
> change my Gnus configuration. There are lots of tutorials on how to
> fetch mail from an imap server. But how do I manage to keep track of
> outgoing messages? Is the best way simply to Bcc all mail and news to
> oneself, and then use the From-address to filter it into appropriate
> folders? It feels kind of backwards.

I believe that you need to read the documentation for the
gnus-message-archive-group variable (C-h v gnus-message-archive-group).
Gnus will happily put outgoing mail wherever you want it to, including
in a folder on your IMAP server.  Alternatively if you end up using
something like OfflineIMAP you can put outgoing mail in a maildir and at
the next sync it will end up in the right place on the IMAP server.

In the long run I think that you will find that making an IMAP server
your primary mailstore is a great idea.

Jason