Fetchmail Ate my inbox!

Linux and Unix-Like Linux
1

Hello All.

I was messing around with Fetchmail on a Test Email account. Here's what my fetchmailrc file looks like:

poll imap.gmail.com proto IMAP fetchall
ssl

When I ran this, it removed all the test emails from my Google Account. There were a few emails that I needed, however, I can still access them from my Linux machine, but would like to know if there was a way that I can move the email from my linux machine back to Google. Is there such a way I can do this, or am I screwed, and have to just read those emails I "lost" from my Linux box?

I believe for this not to happen again, I need to put "keep" in my fetchmail config file. But for now ... can I push those emails back to the server by any chance?

Regards,
Drew

2

There are tools for moving stuff between IMAP boxes; the simplest to set up is probably something like Thunderbird. Just set it up with a local mbox account and a remote Gmail IMAP account, and you should be able to drag messages back and forth. (Message orders, dates, etc might end up different from what they originally were, of course.)

3

Thanks for the reply. Do you have any idea what "tools" that I could use that pertain to the command line? This is a base install of CentOS 5.2. X is not installed. There is no GUI.

Thanks in advanced.
Drew

4

If you are familiar with Perl or Python, they come with IMAP libraries which let you do something like this, although you would have to write a wrapper script around those libraries.

examples/migrate_mbox.pl - metacpan.org vaguely looks like it might do what you want. Otherwise, the append method as described in lib/Mail/IMAPClient.pod - metacpan.org is the thing you should probably use.

I don't know the feature set of Mutt because I don't use it; perhaps it has support for moving between folders on different servers, too. My experience with Gnus IMAP support is that this particular functionality used to be a bit lacking.