[DarkShikari]

I tried this, but Thunderbird simply locked up due to the sheer volume of emails (I subscribe to LKML and other high-volume mailing lists). I haven't been able to find any good backup solution anywhere, and articles like this really scare me.

[cfinke]

Thunderbird 11 is much better than Thunderbird 3.x was at handling a GMail backup. I've just finished backing up ~120,000 messages using Thunderbird 11 (archiving them into monthly folders about once an hour during the backup), and it's doing fine. (I tried the same thing a year ago with Thunderbird and gave up after 45 minutes.)

[aDemoUzer]

good to hear. I had tried THunderbird in the past but it would just crash. Just started today for first time in a year and just upgraded from V7 to v11. Working good so far.

[ef4]

Try getmail. I've used it to suck down a very large amount of mail.

[stock_toaster]

I prefer fdm[1], but I agree that cli mail fetch tools are great for this.

[1]: http://fdm.sourceforge.net/