[Alpine-info] Converting GMail to Mbox format

[via Alpine-info]

> Does anyone have experience converting GMail to Mbox format that can be 

> used by Alpine?


There are a number of ways to do this.

First, Alpine can directly connect to Gmail and read your Gmail mail 
online, without any kind of mirroring or conversion.  This is thoroughly 
documented on the Alpine website, and, for most folks, this is probably 
the best option.

Second, you can use various tools to mirror your Gmail mail to a local 
machine, and then Alpine can read the mail from the local copy.  My 
favorite tool for this is OfflineIMAP.

OfflineIMAP can be configured to do one-way mirroring (changes to the 
local copy never affect the remote Gmail copy; deleting the local copy of 
a message will *not* delete it on the server) or two-way mirroring 
(changes to the local copy are pushed back to the server; deleting the 
local copy of a message *will* delete it on the server), and you can 
choose whichever you prefer for your use-case.  By default OfflineIMAP 
stores messages in maildir format, which is the fastest and most secure 
local mailbox format and is completely compatible with Alpine; but you can 
also convert the local mailbox format to mbox or any other standard 
mailbox format if you're using some ancient legacy program that doesn't 
support maildir.

Fetchmail is another tool that can be used to mirror Gmail to a local 
maildir or mbox.  I don't use this, but a number of other folks on this 
list do, so you can probably get help if you run into problems.

Good luck!


  -Jason