imap backup questions

[shep]

The 21st century has caught me and I'm looking at adapting my mail backup system to
include multiple devices (cellphone) on the same account.

My Workstation uses fetchmail to pull pop3 email, without deleting them on the server,
and Mail Delivery Agent (MDA) stanza to pipe them to nmh. nmh processes them to
#mh format and delivers to +inbox I back these up yearly but they would not include an
email sent from my laptop or cellphone. Once backup'd, I delete all emails from the
server for several reasons: server has storage limits, mail sorting time becomes
noticeable and emails that sit on a server for longer than 6 months have no privacy
protection in the U.S.

My laptop uses mutt w/ imap4, set mbox_type=mh and cellphone Monocles Mail/imap4.

I'm thinking about switching all devices to imap4 and then running a backup
script every 6 months.

@j65nko uses fetchmail as a backup solution but I would like to pull mails from
inbox and sent.
https://daemonforums.org/showpost.ph...79&postcount=1

I prefer storage formats where each email is a spearate file; eg #mh or maildir
http://mutt.postle.net/storage/index.html

mail/offlineimap and mail/isync both look to
handle several folders although I'll be using Spectrum rather than Gmail
Both can utilize maildir format for storage.
http://www.offlineimap.org/doc/use_cases.html http://isync.sourceforge.net/

I've not used mutt mbox_type = maildir and alpine does not support maildir
without a patch - I'm leaning toward staying with mh format but could not find
documentation to use nmh with offlineimap or isync.

Anyone used mutt w/ mbox_type = maildir? Offlineimap/isync with a MDA, specifically nmh?
Also open to alternative suggestions.

Solved: Fetchmail allows multiple email servers to be specified with an mda entry for each server.
One minor annoyance is that passwords for each server are asked in sequence at the start of fetchmail.
The first time I ran it, the SentMail folder had an authorization failure which I suspected was due to a
timeout. I commented out the Inbox entry and retrieved the SentMail box. I tried again w/ Inbox and
SentMail enabled and it downloaded both folders.

Fetchmail does not have a "keep alive" function like Mutt. It may be prudent to split the Inbox and
SentMail boxes into 2 separate fetchmailrc configuration files and run each separately when backing up.
The mda entry worked perfectly to put both folders into #mh format.

I'll post my files in @j65nko howto as a F/U.