[stevehawk]

It's funny. I go through great lengths to encrypt and back up most things of mine but the one thing I just realized I was overlooking? Fastmail. It exists on their server and on my phone in their mobile app but I never thought to just setup Thunderbird/IMAP and keep a local copy updated every so often. It's easy to overlook something.

[jolmg]

Does Thunderbird keep a local, accessible copy of whole accounts when using IMAP? Since the traditional way of using IMAP is by keeping the mails on the server and interacting with them via the server, I would think it doesn't.

Personally, I'm using nodejs-notify[1] to watch all mailboxes of all accounts via IMAP IDLE, and have it execute mbsync[2] when it receives an event to sync the account with a local Maildir. I got my MUA (mu4e[3]) configured to use those Maildirs without doing any IMAP itself.

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nodejs-imapnotify/

[2] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/isync/

[3] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/mu/

[jocoda]

thunderbird can be configured to store mail locally. look at the folder properties /synchronization. has an option for offline use