Informaticus

As a computer scientist I never keep backups of my emails because Google takes care of them :) Recently, I read news about mass-email losses at gmail so I thought it would be a good idea to spend some gigabytes of my backup drives for my valuable emails. The tool of my choice was getmail and luckily I found a lot of postings where users reported that they had successfully retrieved all their mails. Like always when you try something yourself, it doesn't work out. I got an error that the selected mailbox wasn't found on the server. After installing Thunderbird and accessing the GMail account (via IMAP) I found out, that in my case the mailbox name is [Gmail]/Alle Nachrichten instead of [Gmail]/All Mail. I tend do switch languages on webpages with logins so I was surprised because I had spanish as selected language. Maybe these directories are created only once? I'll never know but if you run into the same problem, try to access the GMail account via IMAP and note the directory name for "All Mail / Alle Nachrichten".

Code snippet that fails on my account:

[...]
mailboxes = ("[Gmail]/All Mail",)
[...]

This is my actual config file (located in ~/.getmail/)

[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = imap.gmail.com
username = YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS(at)gmail.com
password = YOUR_PASSWORD
mailboxes = ("[Gmail]/Alle Nachrichten",)
port = 993

[destination]
type = Mboxrd
path = /Volumes/elements/backup/gmail/gmail-backup.mbox
#type = Maildir
#path = /Volumes/elements/backup/gmail/maildir/


[options]
verbose = 2
message_log = /Volumes/elements/backup/gmail/gmail.log
received = false
delivered_to = false
read_all = false