Email backup

I got some 4 Gb of Outlook .pst files that I use for email backup. A few days ago I got kind of tired of having these in a proprietary format that I could not search together with the rest of my emails. And I planning to switch to Ubuntu which makes things even worse. Also, the GMail-looses-your-mail news going around made me really want to get that GMail backup up and running.

So, I fired up the trusty Thunderbird and set GMail as my POP provider. 10 minutes later, all email in GMail was nicely backed up as mbox. Now, how about those .pst files? I googled, found some tips but none of those that looked attractive and efficient actually worked for me. Having Outlook Express around might have helped, but I don’t any longer. So, the obvious but boring choice of using IMAP to transfer all the emails was made. And, for the last couple of days my poor laptop has been humming away transferring email back and forth to the IMAP server I installed locally. More than half of the data has now been migrated and the result looks really good. Before the weekend is over I should hopefully own my data for good :-)