[znpy]

> IMAP's main downside is that you have to trust your email provider to not lose your email. While certainly unlikely, it's not impossible. With OfflineIMAP, you can download your Mailboxes and make you own backups of your Maildir.

A professional mail host ('professional' as in 'someone that somehows makes money by hosting email') is way more unlikely to lose data than most of us are.

Making backup is great by the way, but for such task I'd strongly recommend the good old fetchmail or the newer (and better) fdm (https://github.com/ft/fdm). Both support imap(s). Both can save to either mailbox or maildir.

If you need a local copy, go for fdm and a local copy of your mailbox, plain and simple.

[gh02t]

> A professional mail host ('professional' as in 'someone that somehows makes money by hosting email') is way more unlikely to lose data than most of us are.

I think their point is not that you're less likely to lose it yourself, it's that the probability that both you and the provider losing it at the same time is extremely unlikely. I.e., two points of failure required to lose your data.

[jaskerr]

The fdm project is dead. The Sourceforge project page returns 404, and the Github repository hasn't been updated since 2014. (And the Sourceforge mailing list returns 404 as well.)

The code probably works, but don't expect any help or updates.

[znpy]

I used it a couple of months ago and it worked perfectly.

Not all dead projects are actually dead. Some are just "completed".

[tonyedgecombe]

A bigger worry with a professional mail host is they just cut your account for some arbitrary reason, and if that host is Google then good luck resolving the problem.