A couple of days ago, I found this piece on Digg showing how to back up Gmail messages on a local computer using fetchmail. While the instructions found there are mostly Cygwin-specific, fetchmail has its roots on Unix and those instructions can easily be adapted to Unix-based OS’s.

I decided to try it out and later found that it’s a waste of space to back up everything on my local computer. A lot of my messages on my Gmail account are from mailing lists and those are already available on the mailing list archives. What I really needed to do was to back up only important messages and discard the rest. For that, I needed procmail.

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