[ChuckMcM]

Hmmm, not as effective a call for action as you might want. In part because under US law email delivered to your corporate address is a company asset, not a personal asset.

That said, there is a lot to be gained by having copies of your personal email (and metadata) handy. I am sure I am not unique in that I've got a script that uses imap to pull non-spam email into a temporally ordered store (a DVD-R :-) and a dynamically updated index (initially sqlite, now its more mysql). Still lose stuff of course :-).

[pirer]

Your quite unique. Just making a script for some people is extremely difficult.

[toomuchtodo]

http://gmvault.org/

For those who can't code or don't have the time.

[pirer]

yep but you still need to know a few things as well as: https://github.com/abjennings/gmail-backup or http://www.fetchmail.info/ and https://github.com/Flushot/gmail-backup

[ams6110]

fetchmail for saving, notmuch for indexing/searching.

[blueblob]

offlineimap ftw.