isync: Because the cloud is unreliable

A while back I mentioned offlineimap, and Curtis mentioned isync in reply.

As you can see there, isync (or perhaps more accurately, mbsync) was quite willing to draw in more than 20,000 messages to my local hard drive. In that sense, isync did much as it was reported to do.

And considering I just stole a configuration file from Henrik Pingel, it was a piece of cake to get it working.

I’m no e-mail expert, but what that suggests is making a local backup of my cloud-based e-mail services is well within my grasp. Now I won’t have any more excuses for ignoring applications intended for organizing local e-mail collections. Darn. 😡

It also means that if you’ve come to distrust the pie-in-the-sky claims of the past decade — about cloud services being the wave of the future, and how everything will be online in the years to come — you can be a rebel, collect it all, and keep it locally. Print them out. Make a scrapbook. Invite your friends over for a party. 🙄

Of course, the real attraction in something like isync is to pair it with an outgoing message system, much like Ian described long ago, and put yourself in control of the entire process. Step up. Take responsibility. Clean up and move on. Go straight and choose life. 😉

I should mention that Henrik’s configuration will require you to put your password in plain text, unless you encrypt it in a separate file. I also noted that his default is to ignore some of the less interesting folders GMail uses by default — like sent mail or starred mail. Whether you include those in your e-mail coup d’état is up to you.

Personally I realize now the immensity of six or seven years of e-mail messages that are stashed on GMail’s servers, and that’s only one of my four or five accounts I use. I think maybe I shall save a little drive space for now, and let GMail wrangle all that for a while longer. … 😳