Comments on: Gmail Backups with fetchmail on OS X

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 08:41:12 +0000

Thanks for this, it got me most of the way to a full backup (3.5G ish done, about 1G to go).

I had to embed my ‘fetchmail’ script into a loop for repeated downloading, with a five minute delay between loops to get there, but….

However, it’s now not working. I’m getting lots of ‘not flushed’ messages – and so nothing else is downloading at all.

Any clues?

By: Bas Ben Zineb

Bas Ben Zineb — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:35:38 +0000

Big Tnx!
After being discouraged by some negative posts about the fetchmail route this really did it for me.
Very elegant

@Jim, this was the final step I needed.
Do I put the ’5′ back again?

By: enkerli.wordpress.com/

enkerli.wordpress.com/ — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 06:24:01 +0000

Same issue as Christian and Gary. Eventually used Gmail-Backup instead, but this does look like a better solution, in a few respects.
One thing I find kind of surprising, at this point, is that Google doesn’t offer an elegant solution for backups, with data portability in mind.
At any rate, some cues as to solve this SSL problem would be appreciated.
Just in case it matters: I’m using a non-admin user account, it seems the username shouldn’t include “@gmail.com,” I got the file with two certificates by piping the command’s output to a file (I then deleted lines and saved in the right location), and my Gmail account has been allowing POP for quite a while.

By: Ali Rantakari

Ali Rantakari — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:20:13 +0000

I’ve updated the post with some info about specifying an alternate location for the mail spool file.

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:31:29 +0000

You may need to edit c_rehash or create a link to make it work. On my new osx box it referenced /usr/bin/perl5 which doesnt exist, /usr/bin/perl linked to the newest version (>5) so I just enabled root and removed the ’5′ from c_rehash and things worked great.

Thanks for the way to automate gmail backups.

By: Parnell Springmeyer

Parnell Springmeyer — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:53:26 +0000

Excellent article! It is thorough, well written, and helpful.

Wanted to also comment and say that this method works flawlessly with 10.6 (I didn’t think 10.6 would break anything, but you never know).

By: Gary

Gary — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:17:06 +0000

Hi,
I have the same symptom as Christian Bender. When I run the openssl command, I get a certificate chain with two certificates in it. I’ve tried using each one separately as my gmailpop.pem, and both of them get hashed alright, but fetchmail complains.

Which of the certificates in the chain are we supposed to use? Or are we supposed to combine them somehow?

Thanks for your help with this. I tried getting backup-gmail to work, but it’s closed-source and not designed for Mac OS X. Your solution seems superior.

By: liam

liam — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 14:33:54 +0000

Great post!! Thanks so much!

By: Christian Bender

Christian Bender — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:07:17 +0000

Ich denke ich habe eigentlich alles wie hier beschrieben gemacht. Aber es klappt leider nicht.
“…
fetchmail: Server certificate verification error: unable to get local issuer certificate
fetchmail: Certificate/fingerprint verification was somehow skipped!
fetchmail: SSL connection failed.
…”
Liegt das an Gmail oder an Snow Leopard oder an mir???

By: Ali Rantakari

Ali Rantakari — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:19:24 +0000

Hi Anuj,

The reason I didn’t do it that way is because I wanted to automate this process and have it run in the background instead of having to remember to open Thunderbird and refresh it at regular intervals. But of course if you use Thunderbird as your main mail client anyway, this is a good tip if it indeed accomplishes the same thing.