Dumps entire contents of Google Apps email accounts using OfflineIMAP.

by Geoffrey Roberts
[email protected]
[email protected]

v0.1 Sunday, 10 March 2013

• Ruby
• OfflineIMAP to be installed
  Install it using aptitude, port, homebrew, or whatever depending on your platform.

Copy config-example.rb to config.rb and change dump_config[:host] to your domain.

Run ./getcertfingerprint.sh to get the current SSH certificate fingerprint from your email domain (currently set to Gmail by default). It will print out a long bit of text, something like
6d1b5b5ee0180ab493b71d3b94534b5ab937d042

Change dump_config[:cert_fingerprint] in your config.rb file to whatever this script prints out.

./dump.rb username theirPassword

Dumping a user's entire mailbox takes a long time, especially if they have a lot of messages in there. Make yourself several coffees. Read a book. Read a book. Read a mighty fine book.

Once done, you will have the user's entire email archive, both sent and received, in the folder named for their username. It will take up a lot of disk space, so find something to do with it.

Initial rough-as-guts release

• Find some way to upload it to an archive account or an external store as part of the app process.
• Better documentation.
• Auto-installation for OfflineIMAP.

GPL v2. See LICENSE.txt.

Offtopic: Don't you wish they had a Markdown version instead?