Hi everyone

and happy new year!

I am in contract with a webhoster, having webserver, email and a few other things.

But, there is no way to backup my emails stored on their imap server.
Meaning, when anything happens to that infrastructure (or they go broke)
then all my emails are gone.

So, I'd like to mirror them via imapsync to a local instance of some imap server, and then pack them together as a tgz archive.

Now I see, that there are several solutions out, see subject, and I don't
know which one fits best and what component is needed.

Does anyone have some experience here? Do I need an mta (exim for
instance) to just sync emails from external imap server to local?

Thanks for any hint!

Best regards,

Markus



--
Please reply to group only.
For private email please use http://www.dipl-ing-kessler.de/email.htm

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> writes:

I am in contract with a webhoster, having webserver, email and a few other things.

But, there is no way to backup my emails stored on their imap server. Meaning, when anything happens to that infrastructure (or they go broke) then all my emails are gone.

So, I'd like to mirror them via imapsync to a local instance of some
imap server, and then pack them together as a tgz archive.

Now I see, that there are several solutions out, see subject, and I
don't know which one fits best and what component is needed.

Dovecot is fairly easy to set up. I?ve not tried the other IMAP servers.

Does anyone have some experience here? Do I need an mta (exim for
instance) to just sync emails from external imap server to local?

I?ve never used imapsync but there?s no reason copying messages from one
IMAP server to another should require an MTA.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thu, 1 Jan 2026 20:19:43 -0000 (UTC), Markus Robert Kessler wrote:

I am in contract with a webhoster, having webserver, email and a few
other things.

But, there is no way to backup my emails stored on their imap
server.

I use POP3 for fetching mail from the public-facing server onto my own
machine. So the only mail store that needs backing up is already under
my control.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> wrote:

Hi everyone

and happy new year!

I am in contract with a webhoster, having webserver, email and a few other things.

But, there is no way to backup my emails stored on their imap server. Meaning, when anything happens to that infrastructure (or they go broke) then all my emails are gone.

So, I'd like to mirror them via imapsync to a local instance of some imap server, and then pack them together as a tgz archive.

Now I see, that there are several solutions out, see subject, and I don't know which one fits best and what component is needed.

Personally I'd ignore all those "solutions" as overkill and use
movemail from GNU Mailutils:

movemail -v imaps://no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de mh:///home/[user]/Mail

If you have special characters like '@' in the username, you
may need to percent-encode them, eg. "%40".

https://www.mailutils.org/wiki/Fetching_Mail_with_Movemail

I use MH format for storing the mail, check what format/s your
email client understands and change "mh://" to suit.

https://www.mailutils.org/manual/html_node/Local-Mailboxes.html

I actually use POP to get mail using movemail myself, but it works
with IMAP too.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 01.01.2026 20:19 Uhr Markus Robert Kessler wrote:

So, I'd like to mirror them via imapsync to a local instance of some
imap server, and then pack them together as a tgz archive.

I use Cyrus and like it.
It saves the mail as text files. The metadata information (folder
permissions, read status etc.) is saved in local databases.

--
kind regards
Marco

Send spam to 1767295183muell@stinkedores.dorfdsl.de


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 18:40:16 -0000 (UTC) Lars Poulsen wrote:

On 2026-01-03, Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> wrote:

On 2 Jan 2026 07:43:14 +1000 Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

movemail -v imaps://no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de
mh:///home/[user]/Mail

If you have special characters like '@' in the username, you may need
to percent-encode them, eg. "%40".

https://www.mailutils.org/wiki/Fetching_Mail_with_Movemail

On 2026-01-03, Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de>
wrote:

I use MH format for storing the mail, check what format/s your email
client understands and change "mh://" to suit.

https://www.mailutils.org/manual/html_node/Local-Mailboxes.html

I actually use POP to get mail using movemail myself, but it works
with IMAP too.

Anyway, is there an option to automatically transmit content of more
than 1 folder, i.e. inbox, draft and sent... at once?

What is this "mh:" in a URL? Never saw that before. Is that part of the
generic URL specification? Or is this a quirk of the "movemail"
program?

I guess I need to get out "man movemail" or see what's in
/usr/share/docs ...

Apparently, GNU-Mailutils is not in the Fedora distribution. There are
RPMs for it in SuSE, but I am reluctant to mix "foreign"
RPMs into my Fedora; I have seen that greate small messes in
dependencies. And I really don't like to compile from sources.

Besides this, it looks like movemail can only transmit 'Inbox' but no
other folders?

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 4 Jan 2026 08:05:59 +1000 Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> wrote:

On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 18:40:16 -0000 (UTC) Lars Poulsen wrote:

On 2026-01-03, Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> wrote:

On 2 Jan 2026 07:43:14 +1000 Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

movemail -v imaps://no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de
mh:///home/[user]/Mail

If you have special characters like '@' in the username, you may
need to percent-encode them, eg. "%40".

https://www.mailutils.org/wiki/Fetching_Mail_with_Movemail

On 2026-01-03, Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de>
wrote:

I use MH format for storing the mail, check what format/s your
email client understands and change "mh://" to suit.

https://www.mailutils.org/manual/html_node/Local-Mailboxes.html

I actually use POP to get mail using movemail myself, but it works >>>>>> with IMAP too.

Anyway, is there an option to automatically transmit content of more >>>>> than 1 folder, i.e. inbox, draft and sent... at once?

What is this "mh:" in a URL? Never saw that before. Is that part of
the generic URL specification? Or is this a quirk of the "movemail"
program?

I guess I need to get out "man movemail" or see what's in
/usr/share/docs ...

Apparently, GNU-Mailutils is not in the Fedora distribution. There are
RPMs for it in SuSE, but I am reluctant to mix "foreign"
RPMs into my Fedora; I have seen that greate small messes in
dependencies. And I really don't like to compile from sources.

Besides this, it looks like movemail can only transmit 'Inbox' but no
other folders?

No, just add the folder to the URL, such as:

movemail imaps://foo@example.com/draft mh:///tmp/Mail/draft

I just tested that and it works for me. I can't see any way to download
all the folders with one command like you asked before though.

By the way, if you want to keep the messages on the server, you probably
want to use the "--sync=uidnext" option:

https://www.mailutils.org/manual/html_node/Sync.html

Yes, this way, download by foldername works, thanks!

When wanting the emails to remain on the server, flag '-p' (keep messages)
can be used. What does "--sync=uidnext" differently?

B.t.w., just trying to download folders with special characters in them,
like "Entw�rfe" (drafts). I did not make it yet to get this encoded (for instance "�" in html: &uuml;)

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> wrote:

On 4 Jan 2026 08:05:59 +1000 Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

movemail imaps://foo@example.com/draft mh:///tmp/Mail/draft

I just tested that and it works for me. I can't see any way to download
all the folders with one command like you asked before though.

By the way, if you want to keep the messages on the server, you probably
want to use the "--sync=uidnext" option:

https://www.mailutils.org/manual/html_node/Sync.html

Yes, this way, download by foldername works, thanks!

When wanting the emails to remain on the server, flag '-p' (keep messages) can be used. What does "--sync=uidnext" differently?

As explained at the link, adding "--sync=uidnext" avoids
re-downloading old messages that have already been retrieved when
you run it again.

B.t.w., just trying to download folders with special characters in them, like "Entwurfe" (drafts). I did not make it yet to get this encoded (for instance "u" in html: &uuml;)

With percent encoding that character turns into "%FC", or "%C3%BC"
if it uses UTF-8. There's a conversion table here:

https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> wrote:

On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 18:40:16 -0000 (UTC) Lars Poulsen wrote:

On 2026-01-03, Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> wrote:

On 2 Jan 2026 07:43:14 +1000 Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

movemail -v imaps://no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de
mh:///home/[user]/Mail

If you have special characters like '@' in the username, you may need >>>>> to percent-encode them, eg. "%40".

https://www.mailutils.org/wiki/Fetching_Mail_with_Movemail

On 2026-01-03, Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de>
wrote:

I use MH format for storing the mail, check what format/s your email >>>>> client understands and change "mh://" to suit.

https://www.mailutils.org/manual/html_node/Local-Mailboxes.html

I actually use POP to get mail using movemail myself, but it works
with IMAP too.

Anyway, is there an option to automatically transmit content of more
than 1 folder, i.e. inbox, draft and sent... at once?

What is this "mh:" in a URL? Never saw that before. Is that part of the
generic URL specification? Or is this a quirk of the "movemail"
program?

I guess I need to get out "man movemail" or see what's in
/usr/share/docs ...

Apparently, GNU-Mailutils is not in the Fedora distribution. There are
RPMs for it in SuSE, but I am reluctant to mix "foreign"
RPMs into my Fedora; I have seen that greate small messes in
dependencies. And I really don't like to compile from sources.

Besides this, it looks like movemail can only transmit 'Inbox' but no
other folders?

No, just add the folder to the URL, such as:

movemail imaps://foo@example.com/draft mh:///tmp/Mail/draft

I just tested that and it works for me. I can't see any way to
download all the folders with one command like you asked before
though.

By the way, if you want to keep the messages on the server, you
probably want to use the "--sync=uidnext" option:

https://www.mailutils.org/manual/html_node/Sync.html

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2 Jan 2026 07:43:14 +1000 Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> wrote:

Hi everyone

and happy new year!

I am in contract with a webhoster, having webserver, email and a few
other things.

But, there is no way to backup my emails stored on their imap server.
Meaning, when anything happens to that infrastructure (or they go
broke) then all my emails are gone.

So, I'd like to mirror them via imapsync to a local instance of some
imap server, and then pack them together as a tgz archive.

Now I see, that there are several solutions out, see subject, and I
don't know which one fits best and what component is needed.

Personally I'd ignore all those "solutions" as overkill and use movemail
from GNU Mailutils:

movemail -v imaps://no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de mh:///home/[user]/Mail

If you have special characters like '@' in the username, you may need to percent-encode them, eg. "%40".

https://www.mailutils.org/wiki/Fetching_Mail_with_Movemail

I use MH format for storing the mail, check what format/s your email
client understands and change "mh://" to suit.

https://www.mailutils.org/manual/html_node/Local-Mailboxes.html

I actually use POP to get mail using movemail myself, but it works with
IMAP too.

Hi Kev,

movemail seems to work, thanks!

Well, in the document mh was misspelled as
'mh://Mail' instead of
'mh:///Mail', so it took a while until I got it to work.

Anyway, is there an option to automatically transmit content of more than
1 folder, i.e. inbox, draft and sent... at once?

Best regards,
Markus

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2 Jan 2026 07:43:14 +1000 Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

movemail -v imaps://no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de mh:///home/[user]/Mail

If you have special characters like '@' in the username, you may need to
percent-encode them, eg. "%40".

https://www.mailutils.org/wiki/Fetching_Mail_with_Movemail

On 2026-01-03, Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> wrote:

I use MH format for storing the mail, check what format/s your email
client understands and change "mh://" to suit.

https://www.mailutils.org/manual/html_node/Local-Mailboxes.html

I actually use POP to get mail using movemail myself, but it works with
IMAP too.

Anyway, is there an option to automatically transmit content of more than
1 folder, i.e. inbox, draft and sent... at once?

What is this "mh:" in a URL? Never saw that before. Is that part of
the generic URL specification? Or is this a quirk of the "movemail"
program?

I guess I need to get out "man movemail" or see what's in
/usr/share/docs ...

--
Lars Poulsen - an old geek in Santa Barbara, California

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 18:40:16 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

Apparently, GNU-Mailutils is not in the Fedora distribution. There
are RPMs for it in SuSE, but I am reluctant to mix "foreign" RPMs
into my Fedora; I have seen that greate small messes in
dependencies. And I really don't like to compile from sources.

Maybe you should switch to a more comprehensive distro?

<https://packages.debian.org/trixie/mailutils>

And what?s with this reluctance to compile from source, anyway? It?s
part of the bread and butter of running any Linux distro.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 18:10:11 -0000 (UTC) Lars Poulsen wrote:

On 2 Jan 2026 07:43:14 +1000 Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

movemail -v imaps://no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de
mh:///home/[user]/Mail

If you have special characters like '@' in the username, you may need
to percent-encode them, eg. "%40".

https://www.mailutils.org/wiki/Fetching_Mail_with_Movemail

On 2026-01-03, Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de>
wrote:

I use MH format for storing the mail, check what format/s your email
client understands and change "mh://" to suit.

https://www.mailutils.org/manual/html_node/Local-Mailboxes.html

I actually use POP to get mail using movemail myself, but it works
with IMAP too.

Anyway, is there an option to automatically transmit content of more
than 1 folder, i.e. inbox, draft and sent... at once?

What is this "mh:" in a URL? Never saw that before. Is that part of the generic URL specification? Or is this a quirk of the "movemail" program?

I guess I need to get out "man movemail" or see what's in
/usr/share/docs ...

"mh
A local mailbox in the MH format. User and pass are not used. Host-or- file-name denotes the name of MH folder, e.g., mh://Mail/inbox."

see http://gnu.ist.utl.pt/software/emacs/manual/html_node/Movemail.html

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-01-03, Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> wrote:

On 2 Jan 2026 07:43:14 +1000 Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

movemail -v imaps://no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de mh:///home/[user]/Mail

If you have special characters like '@' in the username, you may need to >>> percent-encode them, eg. "%40".

https://www.mailutils.org/wiki/Fetching_Mail_with_Movemail

On 2026-01-03, Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> wrote:

I use MH format for storing the mail, check what format/s your email
client understands and change "mh://" to suit.

https://www.mailutils.org/manual/html_node/Local-Mailboxes.html

I actually use POP to get mail using movemail myself, but it works with
IMAP too.

Anyway, is there an option to automatically transmit content of more than >> 1 folder, i.e. inbox, draft and sent... at once?

What is this "mh:" in a URL? Never saw that before. Is that part of
the generic URL specification? Or is this a quirk of the "movemail"
program?

I guess I need to get out "man movemail" or see what's in
/usr/share/docs ...

Apparently, GNU-Mailutils is not in the Fedora distribution.
There are RPMs for it in SuSE, but I am reluctant to mix "foreign"
RPMs into my Fedora; I have seen that greate small messes in
dependencies. And I really don't like to compile from sources.

--
Lars Poulsen - an old geek in Santa Barbara, California

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 03/01/2026 21:56, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> wrote:

movemail seems to work, thanks!

Well, in the document mh was misspelled as
'mh://Mail' instead of
'mh:///Mail', so it took a while until I got it to work.

Anyway, is there an option to automatically transmit content of more than
1 folder, i.e. inbox, draft and sent... at once?

I think you have to run a separate movemail command for each
folder (and pointing to each destination folder). But you could put
them in a script and have it add the password or set it in
~/.mu-tickets so you don't have to enter it manually multiple
times.

..and use & to background each folder transfer to spawn many shells to
move it sorta concurrently...


--
?People believe certain stories because everyone important tells them,
and people tell those stories because everyone important believes them. Indeed, when a conventional wisdom is at its fullest strength, one?s
agreement with that conventional wisdom becomes almost a litmus test of
one?s suitability to be taken seriously.?

Paul Krugman


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 21:10:32 +0100 Marco Moock wrote:

On 01.01.2026 20:19 Uhr Markus Robert Kessler wrote:

So, I'd like to mirror them via imapsync to a local instance of some
imap server, and then pack them together as a tgz archive.

I use Cyrus and like it.
It saves the mail as text files. The metadata information (folder permissions, read status etc.) is saved in local databases.

Is there a sample configuration out, to not having to start from scratch
by "trial and error"?

Thank you!

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 03/01/2026 21:56, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> wrote:

movemail seems to work, thanks!

Well, in the document mh was misspelled as
'mh://Mail' instead of
'mh:///Mail', so it took a while until I got it to work.

Anyway, is there an option to automatically transmit content of more than >>> 1 folder, i.e. inbox, draft and sent... at once?

I think you have to run a separate movemail command for each
folder (and pointing to each destination folder). But you could put
them in a script and have it add the password or set it in
~/.mu-tickets so you don't have to enter it manually multiple
times.

..and use & to background each folder transfer to spawn many shells to
move it sorta concurrently...

Maybe, but it might also get you blocked for too many connections
to the IMAP server.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> wrote:

movemail seems to work, thanks!

Well, in the document mh was misspelled as
'mh://Mail' instead of
'mh:///Mail', so it took a while until I got it to work.

Anyway, is there an option to automatically transmit content of more than
1 folder, i.e. inbox, draft and sent... at once?

I think you have to run a separate movemail command for each
folder (and pointing to each destination folder). But you could put
them in a script and have it add the password or set it in
~/.mu-tickets so you don't have to enter it manually multiple
times.


--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 03.01.2026 18:22 Uhr Markus Robert Kessler wrote:

On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 21:10:32 +0100 Marco Moock wrote:

On 01.01.2026 20:19 Uhr Markus Robert Kessler wrote:

So, I'd like to mirror them via imapsync to a local instance of
some imap server, and then pack them together as a tgz archive.

I use Cyrus and like it.
It saves the mail as text files. The metadata information (folder permissions, read status etc.) is saved in local databases.

Is there a sample configuration out, to not having to start from
scratch by "trial and error"?

The default config of Debian is reasonable. If you want mine, let me
know.


--
kind regards
Marco

Send spam to 1767460944muell@stinkedores.dorfdsl.de


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 21:10:32 +0100, Marco Moock wrote:

I use Cyrus and like it.

From a brief look at Cyrus, it seemed potentially quite complicated.
Dovecot was just more approachable.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sat, 10 Jan 2026 07:15:58 +0100 Marco Moock wrote:

I use Cyrus and like it.
It saves the mail as text files. The metadata information (folder
permissions, read status etc.) is saved in local databases.

Is there a sample configuration out, to not having to start from
scratch by "trial and error"?

The default config of Debian is reasonable. If you want mine, let me
know.

Oh yes, thanks - always worth a trial!

Best regards,
Markus


--
Please reply to group only.
For private email please use http://www.dipl-ing-kessler.de/email.htm

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sun, 11 Jan 2026 16:01:26 -0000 (UTC), Markus Robert Kessler wrote:

On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 21:57:23 -0000 (UTC) Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

And what?s with this reluctance to compile from source, anyway?
It?s part of the bread and butter of running any Linux distro.

Yes, debian has it and openSuSE has it. And I can confirm that
compiling from scratch is not as easy as it looked like. I tried to
create a package for Mageia, based on the original tarball, but
there are plenty of dependencies not visible during configure/make/makeinstall.

On Debian and derivatives, if you want to build your own version of a
package, a quick ?apt-get build-dep �package�? will get you all of the dependencies for the standard version of that package. Which should be
most, if not all, of what you need.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 21:57:23 -0000 (UTC) Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 18:40:16 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

Apparently, GNU-Mailutils is not in the Fedora distribution. There are
RPMs for it in SuSE, but I am reluctant to mix "foreign" RPMs into my
Fedora; I have seen that greate small messes in dependencies. And I
really don't like to compile from sources.

Maybe you should switch to a more comprehensive distro?

<https://packages.debian.org/trixie/mailutils>

And what?s with this reluctance to compile from source, anyway? It?s
part of the bread and butter of running any Linux distro.

Yes, debian has it and openSuSE has it.
And I can confirm that compiling from scratch is not as easy as it looked like. I tried to create a package for Mageia, based on the original
tarball, but there are plenty of dependencies not visible during configure/make/makeinstall. It compiled and built, but the result was not funtional. Creating a new rpm out of that failed as well.

Trying to "swipe" the source rpm from other distros is also far from
trivial because most of them are based on tarball 3.15 ... 3.17, which is
6 years or older. So, the current version 3.21 makes some patches obsolete
and instead new dependencies are to be expected.

First I also thought of this text-based set of tools as being an easy job
to build a package, but it turned out that this is not the case.

Best reagards,

Markus


--
Please reply to group only.
For private email please use http://www.dipl-ing-kessler.de/email.htm

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> wrote:

On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 21:57:23 -0000 (UTC) Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

<https://packages.debian.org/trixie/mailutils>

And what's with this reluctance to compile from source, anyway? It's
part of the bread and butter of running any Linux distro.

Yes, debian has it and openSuSE has it.
And I can confirm that compiling from scratch is not as easy as it looked like. I tried to create a package for Mageia, based on the original
tarball, but there are plenty of dependencies not visible during configure/make/makeinstall. It compiled and built, but the result was not funtional. Creating a new rpm out of that failed as well.

Well I built GNU Mailutils 3.21 from source with all the
functionality you require and noted the following dependencies:

readline-dev, libunistring-dev, gnutls38-dev, tcp_wrappers-dev,
libltdl, libtool-dev, libgsasl-dev

At least libgsasl-dev probably isn't needed for your use since I
only added that to enable SMTP authentication using putmail. IMAP authentication using movemail was working before that. Some others
might be surplus to requirements too.

It _does_ tell you better than some what dependencies it's using,
although I agree the docs aren't so clear about the old "what does
this dependency do for _me_?" problem, which is hardly unique to
this project.

*******************************************************************
GNU Mailutils configured with the following settings:

Default mailbox scheme ........ mbox
Use PAM ....................... no
Use -ltdl ..................... yes
Use DBM ....................... no
Use GNU TLS ................... yes
Use GSASL ..................... yes
Use GSSAPI .................... no
Use TCP wrappers .............. yes
Pthread support ............... yes
Readline support .............. yes
Libunistring support .......... yes
MySQL support ................. no
PostgreSQL support ............ no
LDAP support .................. no
Radius support ................ no
Support for virtual domains ... yes

IPv6 support .................. yes

Interfaces:

Guile ......................... no
C++ ........................... no
Python ........................ no

Mailbox formats:

IMAP .......................... yes
POP ........................... yes
MH ............................ yes
maildir ....................... yes
dotmail ....................... yes

Mailers:

SMTP .......................... yes
Sendmail ...................... yes

Utilities to build:

Servers ....................... pop3d imap4d comsat mda lmtpd
Clients ....................... putmail frm mail sieve messages readmsg dotlock movemail mimeview decodemail mh

*******************************************************************

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--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Mon, 12 Jan 2026 12:45:29 +0000 Daniel James wrote:

On 12/01/2026 06:36, Markus Robert Kessler wrote:

Well, these are the BUILD dependencies - are there RUNTIME requirements
also?

Generally (but I don't promise that it always works) if you have the dev
package installed in order to meet the build requirements you not need anything more at runtime.

There are non-dev packages that meet *only* the runtime requirements for people who don't need to meet the build requirements, but if you have
the dev packages you don't need those as well.

B.t.w.,

how do you install all the files retrieved from compiling the tarball from scratch, if you want to avoid building a deb or rpm?

Meaning, do you let "make install" write directly to the filesystem, or do
you pack all that files in one tar.gz and then use "alien" to transform it into a deb or rpm?

Best regards,

Markus


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On Mon, 12 Jan 2026 16:57:12 -0000 (UTC), Markus Robert Kessler wrote:

Meaning, do you let "make install" write directly to the filesystem
...

That?s usually how it?s done. All the well-behaved build scripts
default to putting things in /usr/local, where they don?t clobber
stuff handled by your system standard package manager.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 12/01/2026 06:36, Markus Robert Kessler wrote:

Well, these are the BUILD dependencies - are there RUNTIME requirements
also?

Generally (but I don't promise that it always works) if you have the dev
package installed in order to meet the build requirements you not need anything more at runtime.

There are non-dev packages that meet *only* the runtime requirements for people who don't need to meet the build requirements, but if you have
the dev packages you don't need those as well.

--
Cheers,
Daniel.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 21:10:32 +0100 Marco Moock wrote:

On 01.01.2026 20:19 Uhr Markus Robert Kessler wrote:

So, I'd like to mirror them via imapsync to a local instance of some
imap server, and then pack them together as a tgz archive.

I use Cyrus and like it.
It saves the mail as text files. The metadata information (folder permissions, read status etc.) is saved in local databases.

"local databases" - is this mysql or text based databases?

B.t.w.: Saving emails as text files lets me hope that after upgrade of the imap service or even OS upgrade one day, the old backups stay usable?

I am asking this because I once got into big trouble when I had to move multiple mysql databases to a new machine with new OS and new version of mysqld. - Nothing worked and I had to use mysql-dump to export the data as text-dump on the old system and import them into the new one.
After that, the permission system also had to be set up from scratch
because of different data format...

Best regards,

Markus


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--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
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On 12 Jan 2026 07:20:47 +1000 Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

[..]

Well I built GNU Mailutils 3.21 from source with all the functionality
you require and noted the following dependencies:

readline-dev, libunistring-dev, gnutls38-dev, tcp_wrappers-dev,
libltdl, libtool-dev, libgsasl-dev

At least libgsasl-dev probably isn't needed for your use since I only
added that to enable SMTP authentication using putmail. IMAP
authentication using movemail was working before that. Some others might
be surplus to requirements too.

Interesting, thank you!

Well, these are the BUILD dependencies - are there RUNTIME requirements
also?

Best regards,

Markus


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--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
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Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> wrote:

On Mon, 12 Jan 2026 12:45:29 +0000 Daniel James wrote:

On 12/01/2026 06:36, Markus Robert Kessler wrote:

Well, these are the BUILD dependencies - are there RUNTIME requirements
also?

Generally (but I don't promise that it always works) if you have the dev
package installed in order to meet the build requirements you not need
anything more at runtime.

There are non-dev packages that meet *only* the runtime requirements for
people who don't need to meet the build requirements, but if you have
the dev packages you don't need those as well.

B.t.w.,

how do you install all the files retrieved from compiling the tarball from scratch, if you want to avoid building a deb or rpm?

Meaning, do you let "make install" write directly to the filesystem, or do you pack all that files in one tar.gz and then use "alien" to transform it into a deb or rpm?

If you want to install to the system then of course "make install",
if you want to make a package or just a tar file that can be
unpacked to "/" on similar systems, DESTDIR is useful:

sudo make DESTDIR=/tmp/mailutils install-strip

That installs everything into equivalent directories under
/tmp/mailutils as when you do a "make install", with debugging info
stripped to avoid wasting space. You should still run it as root so
that the file permissions are set correctly. Then you can make a
package or tar archive from the contents of that directory for
installing to other systems running the same distro.

Note occasionally programs won't support "DESTDIR" and will then
install to "/" anyway, and also some won't understand
"install-strip" so you must use "install" instead, then run "strip"
on the binaries manually. But Mailutils supports both, as, it
seems, do all GNU projects.

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--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Markus Robert Kessler <no_reply@dipl-ing-kessler.de> wrote:

On 12 Jan 2026 07:20:47 +1000 Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

Well I built GNU Mailutils 3.21 from source with all the functionality
you require and noted the following dependencies:

readline-dev, libunistring-dev, gnutls38-dev, tcp_wrappers-dev,
libltdl, libtool-dev, libgsasl-dev

At least libgsasl-dev probably isn't needed for your use since I only
added that to enable SMTP authentication using putmail. IMAP
authentication using movemail was working before that. Some others might
be surplus to requirements too.

Interesting, thank you!

Well, these are the BUILD dependencies - are there RUNTIME requirements also?

Sure, all of those with "-dev" removed, except libtool. You can
probably use whatever version of the gnutls package for your distro
is the latest.

readline, libunistring, gnutls, tcp_wrappers, libltdl, libgsasl

Although you can build it without some of those, such as libgsasl
as mentioned before. Of course exact package names will differ
between distros, especially with the "lib" prefixes.

"ldd `which movemail`" is a quick way to see all the libraries
used by the executable, however it will show additional libraries
used by the direct dependenies, without distinction. Another way
is using "readelf -d `which movemail` | grep NEEDED", which just
gives you the immediate dependencies, but then in this case you
get a bunch of "libmu_*" Mailutils libraries which then also need
to be checked with "ldd" or "readelf", and that gets confusing.
Also those tools won't show any libraries or executables that are
loaded after the program has started. Then you have to work out
which packages the libraries belong to, for which the method is
specific to your distro or package format.

Anyway in this case you can just go from the list I gave you above.

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