[Zoom]

I don't often use Mail to view my gmail stuff, but I use it sometimes. I was under the impression that by doing so, I'm making local backups of my gmail. Is that true? I mean, I definitely have a large local email file, but is it just mirroring what's on Google's servers? That is, if the email disappears at the server, will Mail dutifully remove it locally, too? FWIW, I believe I have the account set up as IMAP.

[seanc]

Yep, should work that one will update the other.

[Zoom]

Just to be clear... you're saying that if someone hacks my gmail account and deletes everything, that if I then launch Mail, all my stuff will still be there?

If so, is there a way to push my email history back to gmail's servers?

[Doc HM]

Originally Posted by Zoom 

Just to be clear... you're saying that if someone hacks my gmail account and deletes everything, that if I then launch Mail, all my stuff will still be there?

If so, is there a way to push my email history back to gmail's servers?

No if someone hacks your gmail and then you log on via mail, your local mail will delete to match the state on gmails servers.

To prevent your mail from vanishing you can archive mail folders to a local drive regularly OR via TimeMachine. You can drag copy archived mail back into the imap folders to push mail back up to gmail but left to itself mail simply mirrors gmails servers, it's not syncing as such.

[Cold Warrior]

I use thunderbird to make imap email backups. Configure it, then select all the messages in an imap folder and use thunderbird's Copy option to copy them to a given local folder. This doesn't remove them from the server.

[Zoom]

Thanks, folks.

[besson3c]

For an actual email backup you might want to look into the imapsync script that will actually mirror one account with another. I definitely wouldn't trust the offline cache as a backup, and manually backing up each folder seems laborious to me.