Gmvault: gmail backup. Liberate your emails

http://gmvault.org/

by zoobert • 14 years ago

364 147 14 years ago

gmvault.org

zoobert35• 14 years ago

tools is still in beta. Comments, features are welcome.

orta• 14 years ago

I love the idea, but I wasn't able to use it. http://cl.ly/2m170D012X370n1g2K0S

OSX has some niceties for python apps, you could use py2app to make it an actual binary rather than a folder or bundlebuilder.

Judson• 14 years ago

Seems like the docs are a bit lacking at the moment, but if you open the terminal and change directories to (in your case) "~/Downloads/gmvault-v1.0-beta/bin" and then run "./gmvault" it should work.

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Hi thanks for the feedback. I will try to use the py2app application. If the binary version doesn't work, you also do a standard python installation (http://gmvault.org/install.html#py_install).

gglanzani3• 14 years ago

Same here. Installing with pip (not in a virtualenv), and I get

    Cannot find the python executable to set env var PYTHON_BIN. 
    Please check where your python binary is.

pdubs2• 14 years ago

For Windows:

- Require admin for installer (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb756929.aspx)

- Add to Start Menu

- Doesn't show up in my installed programs list = no standard way to uninstall

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. I have not tested deployment on Vista but on WinXP and Win7. You didn't need to be an admin as far as I saw. The integration in the menu,showing up in the installed program as well as uninstall is in the version 1.1 that should be released next week. I wanted to see if some people would be interested by such tool.

carsonm• 14 years ago

On Vista64: made it through all install screens. No desktop shortcut (even though I asked for one), had to nav to install dir to find it. Ran uninstall and it only did a partial uninstall (I've still got a gunky folder in program files).

espinchi2• 14 years ago

My first thought was "cool, I certainly have to use this", and switched to something else.

I just came back and started to perform a backup. I think you should, too. This is insurance.

For the author: the link from the "Learn More" is broken. It should probably point to install, not documentation.

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Thanks I fixed it. Sorry for the premature launch I think it was somehow a mistake (too early) but I needed a boost to be sure that I was doing something useful.

samuel1604• 14 years ago

wha's the difference between this and a tool like offlineimap?

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Gmvault is a tool entirely dedicated to Gmail so it will recreate your account exactly as it was. Standard imap backuping tool like OfflineIMAP do not preserve labels when restoring emails on an imap server because your have to use a Gmail specific extension. For example it will take care of the Gmail labels and will recreate them when restoring the emails on an account. More features are available. Check the documentation.

rickmb• 14 years ago

Apparently, it also backs up Gmail specific stuff like labels. Which is nice, but if Gmail every bites you in the ass so hard that this is the only way to recover, would you trust Gmail again?

As for myself, I just imap my Gmail accounts and don't use those features exactly to avoid that kind of lock-in. I've used too many email services and clients in my lifetime to assume Google is the final solution. And safeguarding my mail offline with imap works just fine.

callahad5• 14 years ago

As an OfflineIMAP user, I see a few immediate differences:

1. OfflineIMAP expects standard IMAP servers. GMVault has special casing to handle Google's wonky IMAP support, along with features like labels and the "All Mail" directory.

2. OfflineIMAP is GPLv2 (or 3, at your option). GMVault is GPLv3.

3. OfflineIMAP syncs to either a local Maildir or another IMAP server. GMVault syncs to its own custom on-disk representation.

4. OfflineIMAP uses a username/password to log in to servers. GMVault uses XOAuth.

5. OfflineIMAP is fully bi-directional by default; local deletion propagates to the remote server. GMVault notes that "manually deleting emails or emails' directories does not prevent Gmvault from working."

6. GMVault can encrypt its own archives. OfflineIMAP cannot.

Basically, GMVault looks like a much less general-purpose tool, but in its specialization, should allow for a much nicer experience for users that simply want a backup for their GMail account.

I'm fond of the versatility that OfflineIMAP gives me (I can restore my mail to any IMAP server, not just GMail; I can access the local Maildir with other applications like Dovecot and Mutt; etc.), but excited about the possibilities of GMVault for friends and family.

"Do you have your GMail backed up? No? Here, let me install GMVault for you..."

emillon• 14 years ago

I believe that OfflineIMAP now has gmail-specific code (type = Gmail) :

http://docs.offlineimap.org/en/latest/MANUAL.html#sync-from-...

bob872• 14 years ago

How do you get it to encrypt its own archives?

pyre• 14 years ago

Hopefully it flakes out/dies less often than offlineimap.

ernestipark• 14 years ago

If this fails/stops in the middle of syncing, will it restart at the point of failure or start from the beginning again?

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Yes it has these kind of mechanisms are embedded: If there is an error in the middle of a syncing then Gmvault will wait few seconds and try to restart the current operation. After 4 attempts it will leave in error. Gmail imap servers can start to throttle the transfer and also cut the connection. Gmvault also has a restart mode (option --restart) to restart where it was. Actually up to 20 emails before because Gmvault save its "position" (email id synced or restored sucessfully) regularly.

pdk• 14 years ago

Is there a way to make Thunderbird or Mac's Mail do the same thing?

callahad5• 14 years ago

What do you mean? By default, both Thunderbird and Mail.app should fully download and locally save an archive of your mail.

To verify this in Thunderbird, check out Tools -> Account Settings, then go to the "Synchronization & Storage" page. Make sure it's set to "Keep messages for this accounts on this computer," "Synchronize all messages locally regardless of age," and "Don't delete any messages." You can click the "Advanced..." button if you only want to sync certain folders.

To force a sync, you can go to File -> Offline -> Download/Sync Now, but you shouldn't ever have to do that with the above settings.

camiller2• 14 years ago

Yes, but it won't keep the gmail labels etc. And I doubt it would do a restore to gmail.

probably• 14 years ago

Ah, so this is the value-added proposition.

DanBlake3• 14 years ago

Great tool, awesome work. Gmail should really offer a link to backup your mail though. I know you can do it with mail clients and this, but its annoying I cant just download one big zip file from gmail itself.

espinchi2• 14 years ago

I hope they'll eventually do this too. They have this *Data Liberation Front" (http://www.dataliberation.org/), from where you can already download some data in simple zip files.

jemfinch2• 14 years ago

I imagine (and I'm not speaking for my employer here) that it has to do with cost: if the easiest way to backup your email is by using IMAP or POP, it's essentially an incremental backup mechanism. If the easiest way to backup your email is by clicking a link which contains all your email in a .zip file, it would be a non-incremental backup system and its cost would be much higher, because people would be far more likely to repeatedly download the same emails.

DanBlake3• 14 years ago

Maybe there could be a few options? Download all mail, download by month, download by year? Seems like they could solve that problem pretty easily and would be very awesome.

chimeracoder2• 14 years ago

When I first set up offlineimap, it downloaded my entire account history on the first day - I'm not sure how that would be less expensive than a single zip file to download on that same day too.

sp3322• 14 years ago

I don't really see the advantage to that? Do you just prefer HTTP to IMAP? :)

DanBlake3• 14 years ago

Its ease of use and ease of storage. Setting up a mail client and getting it to download everything isnt a 1 click operation.

However, clicking "download backup now" is a very easy 1 click operation, and I can just store that zip file wherever I want. Done.

muyuu• 14 years ago

This would be hard to implement effectively. HTTP sucks for downloading massive files.

Drbble2• 14 years ago

Bizarre that you can download aggs of docsr and phoos-- and photos don't compress! But not a few hunded megs of zipped mail. www.google.com/takeout

Glowbox• 14 years ago

It didn't work for me (TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable), I opened an issue on github.

zoobert35• 14 years ago

ok thanks. I will study the issue and fix it.

mattjaynes• 14 years ago

Here's a workaround from the GH issue's comments:

Solution: set 'Show in IMAP' in Settings->Labels->All Mail on gmail.com

https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault/issues/2#issuecomment-555...

utexaspunk• 14 years ago

Sweet! I'm gonna keep my gmail backup on my google drive!

amouat2• 14 years ago

Err, isn't there a flaw in that plan?

Surely the back-up should protect you in case you lose access to your Google account...

camiller2• 14 years ago

I think he was trying to be subtly ironic. Perhaps too subtle.

mikemarotti3• 14 years ago

Granted this isn't working for me to begin with (http://i.imgur.com/yLzyy.png), but will this tool work to archive Google Apps email accounts? eg. Gmail accounts that do not end in gmail.com?

weiran• 14 years ago

It's working on my Apps account.

gglanzani3• 14 years ago

Also with mine.

zoobert35• 14 years ago

At the beginning of the bash script gmvault there is a variable called GMVAULT_HOME. If instead of .. you had the full path to the gmvault-v1.0-beta dir that should work. If there are more problem could you please run it like this: $>sh -x ./gmvault sync .... and send me the console print.

I will fix that in the next version. Thanks for the feedback

mikemarotti3• 14 years ago

Still not working for me, I will send you an email. Thank you for working on this tool though - our company would gladly pay for an enterprise version of this (especially if it was a bit more seamless and integrated with Google Apps somehow).

igurari• 14 years ago

You might want to consider another name in light of the Google Vault product: http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/products.html...

pilif3• 14 years ago

if your tagline is "For geek and non-geek users." then you probably should not be depending on users to open a shell and type commands there to access their emails.

For this to be remotely useful for non-geeks, try adding a small IMAP server so people can access the mails through their mail clients. Having to re-upload all mail back to a (presumably new) gmail account will take ages and accessing the mails locally is not really helpful these days with mime encoding and HTML email.

On a related note: If you have a small box with a PTR record laying around somewhere, you can use my setup described at http://pilif.github.com/2011/02/how-i-back-up-gmail/ to route all incoming and outgoing mail through a mail server you own as it moves to and from gmail.

If you ever lose your google account or its data, all mails will be on your small box in convenient maildir format, ready to be served over IMAP.

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Thanks for the comment. Yeah the "for geek and non-geek" is a bit premature. I would like to create a gui for the tool that will be for non geek. Regarding your second points, currently Gmvault is a tool to backup your Gmail account and restore it into a Gmail account preserving labels and unread emails, etc. The Gmail web interface I think is the premiere interface for Gmail and with Gmvault, I want to offer to users a "safety belt for Gmail" (backup and incremental backup) and allow them to restore all your emails as they were in the Gmail web interface.

v0cab• 14 years ago

I really hate being called a geek. I associate it with bullying and social exclusion. It may be OK to be a geek in Silicon Valley, but that's not true everywhere.

If you bring that line back, please replace it with 'For techies and non-techies' or similar.

kijin2• 14 years ago

> try adding a small IMAP server so people can access the mails through their mail clients. Having to re-upload all mail back to a (presumably new) gmail account will take ages and accessing the mails locally is not really helpful these days with mime encoding and HTML email.

One of the stated purposes of this tool is to "liberate your emails" by letting you keep local copies of every e-mail you send and receive. If you need to use a third-party IMAP server to keep a backup of your e-mails, how does that liberate you? Now you're dependent on two online services instead of one.

Reading locally stored e-mails would be a problem for non-geeks, though. But I think the right way to solve that problem would be to offer a program to read those e-mails, or even better, a plugin to a popular mail client (such as Thunderbird) so that the e-mails can be accessed through the mail client. Depending on the "cloud" just detracts from the stated purpose of this tool.

pilif3• 14 years ago

I wasn't talking about a third party IMAP server. I was talking about adding an IMAP darmon right in the backup application itself.

That way, if your google account goes away (I guess we all agree that administrative account lockout is way more likely than google actually losing data) and you need an email RIGHT NOW, you would just configure any imap client to use the daemon provided by the backup application (localhost:143)

Or it could bundle some web based mail client and then open a browser.

It's impractical to reupload the whole backup to gmail before being able to access your mail.

callahad5• 14 years ago

> Now you're dependent on two online services instead of one.

I think you're misunderstanding pilif's comment. That "small IMAP server" would run locally on your box, which gets you to the goal of having any standard mail client read the archive.

andrewpi• 14 years ago

Does this use SSL to grab the emails?

callahad5• 14 years ago

Be default, yes: https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault/blob/master/src/gmv/imap_...

However, if I recall correctly, Python's built-in SSL support doesn't do certificate verification, so you're still completely open to man in the middle attacks.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

That's a good point, and a tool like this probably really should be verifying the host.

(To the author) See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1087227/validate-ssl-cert... for multiple options to accomplish this.

afterburner2• 14 years ago

I used another Gmail backup tool once that made all my emails "read". Does this do that too?

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Normally yes or as I said above it is a bug and you should report it there: http://gmvault.org/report_pb.html

afterburner2• 14 years ago

Thanks for the reply. Your answer is confusing, but I see from your other replies that GMVault is supposed to preserve read/unread status.

bvi2• 14 years ago

When restoring a gmail account (say I want to upload all the backed-up emails to a new account), would the date information be preserved as well?

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Yes of course. Date, Gmail labels and IMAP flags (READ, UNREAD, ...) are preserved. Otherwise it is a bug so please refer to http://gmvault.org/report_pb.html

bvi2• 14 years ago

Another question: Does gmvault work behind a proxy?

jenius3• 14 years ago

Crappy design + twitter bootstrap default = tab closed. If you are serious about releasing a product ffs make sure it's polished. If the attention to detail I see in the splash page is similar to the attention to detail in the actual product (which is what I assume automatically), my faith in it is close to zero.

This is ESPECIALLY important when I'm authorizing you with access to my emails -- and there is no way I would do that for someone that I assume is not serious about their product.

haldean• 14 years ago

This seems to be an unpopular idea but I completely agree. I don't mind the Bootstrap default theme, but the icon is bad enough that I lose trust in it.

Estragon• 14 years ago

My taste for design is pretty weak, so I'm always interested in comments like this. The design looks OK to me. What are the problems with it?

kreek• 14 years ago

The main issue, for me, is that "Gmvault Gmail Backup" and the logo are unbalanced. The logo is too big, and its colors could be more sophisticated. If those things were cleaned up it would look fine (unless you're allergic to boostrap).

ardillamorris• 14 years ago

I think you are misjudging. What if he spent a lot of time in the product making sure it works well without too much care for "shininess"? If anything, using twitter bootstrap shows that he cared a bit to make it look usable from a splash site point of view. I think we should give feedback on how the product is actually working rather than complaining that he's using twitter bootstrap.

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Thanks for the support. I am not a designer, I am not working full time on this product and my free time is quite limited. Still I spent lots of time designing the logo. I kind of like it as it is very simple and tells you what the product is. Regarding the website, yes I used bootstrap because it is convenient and give you a good modern look quickly. I am not a web designer and didn't want to spend 60% of my project time on that part. For the moment I prefer to spend more time on the tool itself.

If somebody wants to help to improve the website and the documentation please contact me.

swaits• 14 years ago

You left out the part where you were swirling your wine in its glass and adjusting your top hat while angling your nose sharply toward the sky.

HN is a place where lots of launches happen. A place where open mindedness is a plus. Seriously.. if this is actually your attitude, you might miss some cool things. Take a step away from the hive mindset every now and then.

jenius3• 14 years ago

There's no hive mindset here - I just looked at the page, noticed that it had really poor and sloppy design, and assumed that it was a poor and sloppy product. It's called 'judging a book by it's cover' and is something that everyone does automatically (regardless of the classic advice).

Craigslist aside, you'll be hard pressed to find a successful product that has no attention paid to design whatsoever. Design is important, and it makes me really sad to see it neglected, and so many people supporting not caring about design here (as indicated by comments like this and downvotes)

jenius3• 14 years ago

Wow, really surprised this was downvoted. Perhaps it came off as too judgmental and arrogant - if that's the case I very much apologize - didn't intend it to be like that. Just a little tough love : )

I thought people here valued polish and attention to detail... while this may or may not be a fine product, nobody can deny that there was absolutely no effort put into the design. This is really significant - all the downvotes here indicate to me "fuck design, we don't care how your product looks" which is really backwards for hacker news...

boreacrat2• 14 years ago

In my experience most open source tools like this have a sentence-long description on their sourceforge page or a brief introduction on their github repo, which puts this miles ahead in terms of design effort.

sneak• 14 years ago

I think people familiar with command-line tools are already probably doing what I do, which is to use mbsync to sync a remote gmail imap account to a local maildir. It even easily supports multiple sync account/maildir pairs via its somewhat confusing config file format.

http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html

bob872• 14 years ago

What is the switch to encrypt the archives? gmvault -e? I haven't been able to find it in the documentation.

zyb09• 14 years ago

Wow, very cool! This is exactly what I needed right now. I had bad dreams about what would happen if my Google account disappeared all of the sudden, but didn't do anything about it yet. Now I will be able to sleep better!

fogol• 14 years ago

Is there any data transmitted to servers other than Google's?

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Nop of course not. You can check the sources to be sure that Gmvault is only talking to Gmail. You can also use XOAuth (token security mechanism) to allow Gmvault accessing your account. This is by the way the recommended authentication way.

digitalsushi• 14 years ago

Just a few weeks ago I was looking for exactly this piece of software! What brilliant timing.

But a quick question of concern - gmail is pretty smart and can tell when I am just using it for bulk storage. If you send yourself 8 emails in a short amount of time, each with maximum sized attachment sizes, gmail will politely tell you to cut it out for a while.

Does this software run the same risk? I am wary to let it just keep barging in after connection errors, if there's a chance gmail will get upset and ban me from my own account. My gmail is my lifeblood, and I want to back it up from the entity that scares me the most of taking it away from me.

Thanks for making this!!

justincormack• 14 years ago

It should be no different from what would happen if you connect a new imap program that does a full sync of your mailbox, which many do.

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Well so far I've been doing many download and upload of my entire mailbox (5 GB) and the Gmail team did not contact me to tell me to slow down a bit. Sometimes (especially during the week-end ?) the connection was cut and I could had to wait to finish to restore my gmail account.

PanMan• 14 years ago

Nice tool! I think the default sync interface should show a progress bar (like wget). Now it says: Processing 7890 emails, but then it prints a line for every email. I don't need to see every email in a list, but I would like to see how long it takes to complete. Update: I see it does print that every once in a while. I would skip the other lines... :)

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. I will think on how to present operation progresses (progress bar and so on with curses and so on)

villagefool• 14 years ago

"After that Gmvault will automatically authenticate itself using the credentials stored in $HOME/.gmvault (or %HOME%/.gmvault for Windows). " how are the credentials stored offline?

hmottestad• 14 years ago

Probably as clear text. You can delete the file if you want to.

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Nop they are stored encrypted with a key randomly generated

LyleK• 14 years ago

Can this store mail in mbox format? In what header do the gmail labels go?

callahad5• 14 years ago

The source is pretty easy to read. Here's how it's working: https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault/blob/master/src/gmv/gmvau...

(It stores each mail in two separate files: a .eml file with the message body, and a .meta file with metadata.)

zoobert35• 14 years ago

I will take that as a compliment. Yes files are all stored individually as .eml file. All the extra Gmail info (labels, ...) goes in .meta

michaelmior2• 14 years ago

For anyone trying to get the Linux version to work, here's what worked for me.

1. Download the tgz and unzip.

2. Create and activate a new virtualenv in that directory.

3. easy_install -U distribute (in my case, the version of distribute installed by pip was too old for imapclient)

3. pip install logbook gdata imapclient

4. Replace bin/gmvault with the following

    #!/usr/bin/env python
    import sys
    import os
    
    sys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath(os.path.join(sys.path[0], '../lib')))
    
    import gmv.gmv_cmd as runner
    runner.bootstrap_run()

zoobert35• 14 years ago

the release on HackerNews is a bit premature. I wanted to test the response and was not expecting so much interest. I will fix the deployment issues on Linux and Mac OS X. You can download the tgz and run a michael said.

You can also use easy_install or pip. It is on Pypi Create a virtualenv as it is better and do: pip install gmvault (or easy_install gmvault)

See http://gmvault.org/install.html#py_install for further info

chbrown2• 14 years ago

No resume functionality? Or am I just missing something? I've got ~3 GB of emails in my Gmail, and GVault's ETA is 4 hours.

It already timed-out once (no discernable reason), and after restarting, went right to email number 1 (forgetting about the 1800 emails it had already gotten through).

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. There is a restart functionality use the --restart option (see gmvault sync -h for more info). Also note that when you restart from scratch, if the email has already been downloaded and is identical then the download is not performed. So only scanning the mailbox is faster than having downloads.

Regarding the timeout, please send me the error message you had and if it is a bug I will fix it but note that sometimes Gmail cut the connection without any reasons. There is also a retry reconnect process (up to 4 times) if it is not a fatal error (cannot recover from them).

chbrown2• 14 years ago

Seems like this guy is getting the same error:

https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault/issues/4

(Issue number 4 on the github project.)

I added my output to the issue.

I'm on Gmvault v1.0-beta from pypi. It doesn't recognize the --restart option. "gmvault: error: unrecognized arguments: --restart"

davidradcliffe• 14 years ago

Restart doesn't seem to be available. https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault/issues/4

eblume• 14 years ago

Oh wow - this is really interesting. I just released a VERY similar program called `gmail-safe` yesterday. I was going to do a Show HN sometime today.

If anyone is interested, here is the URI: http://eblume.github.com/gmail_safe/

Note that this is my first Node app. It needs a lot of polish. It is published under the MIT license, though, which some people here might enjoy.

rcthompson2• 14 years ago

Small nitpick: the application name "Gmvault" is inconsistent with the tagline "Liberate your emails", since one does not normally associate vaults with liberation. Maybe something like "protect your email" would be more vault-appropriate?

zoobert35• 14 years ago

;-) I like that. Thanks for helping me keeping the theme right

rcthompson2• 14 years ago

Also, don't go with exactly "Protect your email", since it sounds kind of bland. Just something like that. Maybe "Safeguard your email". Find an exciting synonym for "protect"!

delinquentme• 14 years ago

Has no one mentioned search? intra-gmail search is nothing short of an atrocity compared to the google.com search... A search feature capturing partial terms "Aft" in "Afternoon" would more than make this service viable.

ljosa• 14 years ago

How does this compare to mbsync?

zoobert35• 14 years ago

mbsync is a IMAP sync tool. Gmvault is a dedicated Gmail tool so it preserves all Gmail specific attributes like the labels, ... and allow you to restore all your emails in a Gmail account. With mbsync you might be able to upload your emails on a gmail account but you would then loose lots of information and your restored gmail account would be end up being very different.

creativityhurts2• 14 years ago

OP: I understand I will collect down votes with this comment but, seriously, you gave credit to everybody in the footer except to Twitter Bootstrap, which you didn't even bother to personalize. Is that part of the brogrammer code, guzzle down some redbulls, fire up bootstrap and don't even bother about it?

Invest a bit of time in the looks of your service/startup, if it looks like the next service/startup, it's just another Boostrap themed website that people (I assume) are tired of.

zoobert35• 14 years ago

Uuuuh I think there is scale issue. This is an open source tool that I am willing to support. I do not intend to create a start-up here. Still you are right and I will reference bootstrap.

creativityhurts2• 14 years ago

I understand that and it's pretty awesome. Have the frontend on Github and I can help you tweak it out. Open source stuff should look awesome as well.

kozubik• 14 years ago

No promises, but I think we will enable this on rsync.net storage arrays...

We already have s3cmd in our environment, so you can:

ssh user@rsync.net s3cmd get s3://rsynctest/mscdex.exe

So if we put this into the environment, you could call it over SSH:

ssh user@rsync.net gmvault sync foo.bar@gmail.com

... which is fantastic.

Gmvault: gmail backup. Liberate your emails

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