Backup email?

[Knute Johnson]

On 9/4/2011 9:52 AM, Avi Greenbury wrote:
> Knute Johnson wrote:
>
>> Is there a way to backup emails?  My mail server has about 6GB of
>> emails stored in IMAP accounts that could be kept somewhere else if I
>> had a way to get at them occasionally.  Is there a simple offline
>> storage system that would work with Thunderbird?
>
> You should find that you can just copy the maildir or mbox from your
> server to your local PC and point your mail client at it. Much as I've
> not checked for some time, I've never come across a mail client that's
> not been able to do this.
>
> As for finding the maildirs or mboxes, that should be relatively easy -
> how well do you know the configuration of your mailserver?
>

I have a stock Ubuntu server 10.04LTS running sendmail and dovecot IMAP. 
  The mail is stored mbox so there are files in the user's home and in 
/var/mail.

I can't seem to find anything in Thunderbird that would allow me to 
access mail from a file.


-- 

Knute Johnson