Nothing bad happened…yet. I’m currently looking into backup regimes for the department and it occurred to me the other day when gmail was getting funky that I have a lot of important information there. Other’s have apparently learned this the hard way. Luckily Gmail offers pop access that leaves the messages on the server so I just set-up a normal pop3 account in kmail and downloaded everything so I have a local copy. I could have probably just found some scripts that would do it without the full application but I wanted an easy fix for now. I might write something that I can cron later.

A couple of things I ran into is that for some reason kmail only downloaded around 300-400 messages each time. I’m not sure if this is google throttling or a setting I couldn’t find in kmail. Also remember that Gmail gives you the total conversations under All Mail, not messages. The total number of messages I had to download was much higher.

Here’s a tutorial for Outlook that spurred me into action.