On 07/03/15 00:58, Yasha Karant wrote: > My department is being forced by the university administrative IT unit > to MS Office365 distributed server ("cloud") email service, as I have > communicated in a previous query. We are now being advised by others > who have been forced to do this -- but of course not by IT -- to backup > all of our email. I use Mozilla Thunderbird, incoming IMAP, outgoing to > a designated SMTP server.
To speed up my Thunderbird setup many years ago, I installed dovecot + offlineimap using maildir. Thunderbird connects to localhost and I just run offlineimap in the background when I've logged into my networks. That works quite fine, as offlineimap synchronises mails and folders both ways. For outgoing e-mail, I use the corporate SMTP server directly, as that is usually not the bottle neck. Having this said, I know Thunderbirds IMAP support have gotten better. But as my setup have worked so well, it provides me with a guaranteed copy of all my mail at any time I've stayed on this setup. If I need some old stuff, I can easily enough search for it locally, even if I don't have an Internet connection handy. And since I'm using IMAP and a proper maildir setup for "incomming" mails, I'm not even bound to Thunderbird if I decide to switch to something else. -- kind regards, David Sommerseth