Dump IMAP inbox to a local folder in a regular backupable format: EML, TXT, HTML, PDF, JSON and attachments.

This program aims to save a mailbox for archive using files in indexable or searchable formats. The produced files should be readable without external software, for example, to find an email in backups using only the terminal.

Note

Why a fork?

This is a modified version, to include features that I believe are helpful as a CLI tool and a Docker service, as well as extending the readme with helpful infos. I use it together with ImapSync.

Some new features:

• Test only mode (login credentials test), optionally output list of folders
• Argument to specify a specific config file
• Argument to show a version
• Accounts can be specified as DSN, provided in the config and multiple times in CLI
• A commandline helper to create a DSN
• Changed error handling to behave like a common CLI tool, errors are logged to error pipe
• Added email search option
• Modernized the docker files
• Added documentation about how to use docker, adding metadata from subfolders to elasticsearch, building binaries and more, info on how to run the python script locally

Quick use, using the released binary

imapbox -l ./backup --dsn imaps://username:password@imap.server.tld/__ALL__

See more below

• about shell arguments
• DSN argument

Backup email folder

For each email in an IMAP mailbox, a folder is created with the following files:

File	Description
message.html	If an html part exists for the message body. the message.html will always be in UTF-8, the embedded images links are modified to refer to the attachments subfolder.
message.pdf	This file is optionally created from message.html when the wkhtmltopdf option is set in the config file.
attachments	The attachments folder contains the attached files and the embeded images.
message.txt	This file contain the body text if available in the original email, always converted in UTF-8.
metadata.json	Various informations in JSON format, date, recipients, body text, etc... This file can be used from external applications or a search engine like Elasticsearch.
raw.eml.gz	A gziped version of the email in .eml format.

Imapbox was designed to archive multiple mailboxes in one common folder tree, copies of the same message spread knew several account will be archived once using the Message-Id property, if possible (ID not missing, ID not to long for filesystem).

Use cases

• Merge multiple mail accounts in one searchable folder.
• Archive multiple accounts into different folders.
• Report on a website the content of an email address, like a mailing list.
• Sharing address of several employees to perform cross-searches on a common database.
• Archiving an IMAP account because of mailbox size restrictions, or to restrain the used disk space on the IMAP server.
• Archiving emails to PDF format.

Usage without config file

See: about DSN: Usage example

Config file

Use ./config.cfg ~/.config/imapbox/config.cfg or /etc/imapbox/config.cfg

Alternatively specifiy the shell argument -c (or --config) to provide the path to a config file. E.g. -c ./config.client1.cfg

Example:

[imapbox]
local_folder=/var/imapbox
days=6
wkhtmltopdf=/opt/bin/wkhtmltopdf
specific_folders=True
# test_only=True


[accountName1]
host=mail.domain.tld
username=username@domain
password=secret
ssl=True

[username2@gmail.com]
host=imap.googlemail.com
username=username2@gmail.com
password=secret
remote_folder=INBOX
port=993

[username3@domain.tld]
dsn=imaps://username:password@domain.tld/__ALL__

[username4@domain.tld]
username=username4@domain.tld
password=secret
dsn=imaps://domain.tld/__ALL__

To run only a single account, the shell argument -a or --account can be used to specify which to use.

Shell arguments not realted to the config sections

Argument	Description
-h, --help	Show the help for all available shell arguments
-c PATH, --config PATH	Path to a config file to use see Config file
-a ACCOUNT, --account ACCOUNT	Select a specific account section from the config to backup
-v, --version	Show the current version
-s FILTER, --search FILTER	Search in backuped emails (Filter: Keyword,"fnmatch syntax") see Search in emails without indexation process > Inbuild command
-i, --input-dsn	Helper to generate a DSN string, adding the optional "gui" parameter will open the DSN generator in a GUI, can be used with --test see about DSN

Note

imap --input-dsn gui has an option to execute the backup, but the log will only be visible if started from the commandline. This is a not yet very practical for users with no shell experience, this makes the GUI part incomplete and should be concidered experimental.

The imapbox section

Possibles parameters for the imapbox section, all are optional:

Parameter	Description
local_folder	The full path to the folder where the emails should be stored. If the local_folder is not set, imapbox will default to download the emails in to the current folder (within docker, it defaults to /var/imapbox). This can be overwritten with the shell argument -l or --local-folder.
days	Number of days back to get in the IMAP account, this should be set greater and equals to the cronjob frequency. If this parameter is not set, imapbox will get all the emails from the IMAP account. This can be overwritten with the shell argument -d or --days.
wkhtmltopdf	The location of the wkhtmltopdf binary. By default pdfkit will attempt to locate this using which (on UNIX type systems) or where (on Windows). This can be overwritten with the shell argument -w or --wkhtmltopdf.
specific_folders	Backup into specific account subfolders. By default all accounts will be combined into one account folder. This can be overwritten with the shell argument -f or --folders.
test_only	Only a connection and folder retrival test will be performed, adding the optional "folders" as parameter will also show the found folders. This can be overwritten with the shell argument -t or --test.

Other sections

You can have has many configured account as you want, one per section. Sections names may contains the account name.

Possibles parameters for an account section:

Parameter	Description
host	(required) IMAP server hostname
username	(required) Login id for the IMAP server.
password	(required) The password will be saved in cleartext, for security reasons, you have to run the imapbox script in userspace and set chmod 700 on your ~/.config/mailbox/config.cfg file. The user will prompted for a password if this parameter is missing.
remote_folder	(optional) IMAP folder name (multiple folder name is not supported for the moment). Default value is INBOX. You can use __ALL__ to fetch all folders.
port	(optional) Default value is 993.
ssl	(optional) Default value is False. Set to True to enable SSL
dsn	(optinoal) Use a specific DSN to set account paramaters. All other parameters in the account section will overwrite these. The path defaults to remote_folder. To supply a single account only (instead of the config), this can be used multiple times with the shell argument -n <dsn> and --dsn <dsn>.

about DSN:

DSN Example: imaps://username:password@imap.server.tld:993/__ALL__

Usage example:

imapbox -l ./test -f --dsn imaps://username:password@imap.server.tld/INBOX,Sent --dsn imaps://username:password@imap.server2.tld/__ALL__

The DSN shell arguments can be used with a config file, but will ignore all configured account and only honor the imapbox section.

You may generate a DSN with the commandline helper like:

imapbox --input-dsn

It will ask the following before generating the DSN and showing it to the shell:

Host:
Port [993]:
Use SSL? [Y/n]:
Username:
Password:
Remote folder (use __ALL__ to fetch all) [INBOX]:

If the username, password or host contain any character considered special in a URI (such as : / ? # [ ] @ ! $ & ' ( ) * + , ; =), you must encode them. See RFC 3986 for the full list of reserved characters, for a simple overview see urlencode. (You may use online urlencode tools to convert).

Metadata file

Property	Description
Subject	Email subject
Body	A text version of the message
From	Name and email of the sender
To	An array of recipients
Cc	An array of recipients
Attachments	An array of files names
Date	Message date with the timezone included, in the RFC 2822 format
Utc	Message date converted in UTC, in the ISO 8601 format. This can be used to sort emails or filter emails by date
WithHtml	Boolean, if the message.html file exists or not
WithText	Boolean, if the message.txt file exists or not

Elasticsearch

The metadata.json file contain the necessary informations for a search engine like Elasticsearch. Populate an Elasticsearch index with the emails metadata can be done with a simple script.

Create an index:

curl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/imapbox?pretty'

Add all emails to the index:

#!/bin/bash
cd emails/

IFS=$'\n'
for METADATAPATH in $(find . -name "metadata.json"); do

    subdir="${LINE%/metadata.json}"
    ID="${subdir##*/}"

    curl -XPUT "localhost:9200/imapbox/message/${ID}?pretty" --data-binary "@${METADATAPATH}"
done

A front-end can be used to search in email archives:

• Calaca is a beautiful, easy to use, search UI for Elasticsearch.
• Facetview2

Search in emails without indexation process

Inbuild command

The -s and --search shell argument with a filter parameter with the syntax of Keyword,"fnmatch syntax" can be used to perform simple a simple search in the local_folder for emails. The local_folder is taken from the current configuration or -l/--local-folder shell argument.

The possible keys (case sensitive) are listed in the Metadata file section.

Examples:

imapbox --search From,"user@domain.*"  # any tld
imapbox --search Body,"*some text*"    # in between text
imapbox --search WithText,True         # check boolean value

imapbox --local-folder ./backups --search From,"user@domain.*"

fnmatch accepts shell-style wildcards, * as any length of characters and ? as single character as well as [seq] for any of the defined characters in the group and [!seq] for none of the characters in the group. See: https://docs.python.org/3/library/fnmatch.html

Shell scripts

jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor.

Example command to browse emails:

find . -name "*.json" | xargs cat | jq '[.Date, .Id, .Subject, " ✉ "] + .From | join(" ")'

Example with a filter on UTC date:

find . -name "*.json" | xargs cat | jq 'select(.Utc > "20150221T130000Z")'

Powershell examples:

gci -r -filter *.json |% { gc $_ | ConvertFrom-Json } |? { $_.Subject -imatch "Welcome" }
gci -r -filter *.json |% { gc $_ | ConvertFrom-Json } |? { $_.From -imatch "Support" }
gci -r -filter *.json |% { gc $_ | ConvertFrom-Json } |? { $_.Date -imatch "13 Aug 2024" }
gci -r -filter *.json |% { gc $_ | ConvertFrom-Json } |? { $_.UTC -gt "20240813T164821Z"  }

Restoring emails

The EML files are the restoreable files. These can be opened with Outlook, Thunderbird, MacOS Mail and most other email software, as well as showing the UTF-8 content on commandline.

The EML files text files, UTF-8 encoded, and compressed by gzip before backuped.

Using a graphical desktop

The unziped files can be double-clicked on most systems to view the mail, and may be drag-and-dropped into a mail account to be uploaded to that account.

It might help to navigate with a file browser into the specific backup folder, find all raw.eml.gz files, unzip them into a temp folder, then drag all EML files from there into your mail softwares account's folder.

Using the commandline

• If you're using Windows, you can extract GZ files using the tar -xvzf filename.gz command in Command Prompt or by installing the 7-Zip program and using 7zip x filename.gz

  tar:
  x = eXtract 
  z = filter through gZip
  v = be Verbose (show activity)
  f = filename
  

• On a Mac, just double-click the file to extract it, or use the command gunzip filename.gz in a Terminal window.
• If you're using Linux, use the gzip -d filename.gz to extract the files.

Local install

This script requires Python 3.4+ and the following libraries:

• chardet – required for character encoding detection.
• pdfkit – optionally required for archiving emails to PDF.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/bananaacid/imapbox.git ./imapbox

cd imapbox 

python -m venv ./

# mac/bash/wsl
source ./bin/activate
# ps1
.\Scripts\Activate.ps1

pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt

cd ..

# usage
# a config.cfg is expected as described above
python ./imapbox/imapbox.py

Usage with Docker compose

Docker image: bananaacid/imapbox

services:

  imapbox:
    image: bananaacid/imapbox:latest
    container_name: imapbox
    volumes:
      # use a docker volume, as backup location
      - imapbox_data:/var/imapbox

      # if you want to specify a specific folder as backup folder
      #- ./tmp/backup/:/var/imapbox/

      # change the path './config.cfg' to the config
      # mounting files: an absolute path is always required
      #- ${PWD}/tmp/config.cfg:/etc/imapbox/config.cfg
      #
      # relative binding works fine
      - type: bind
        source: ./tmp/config.cfg
        target: /etc/imapbox/config.cfg

volumes:
  imapbox_data:

Note

The docker container defaults local_folder internally to /var/imapbox to backup emails, if run within docker.

There is no need to specify local_folder within the config or as shell argument.

Clean up, remove last generated container:

docker compose rm imapbox

Build an executable

Linux/WSL (bash)

Within the same Py-Env, do:

pip install --no-cache-dir  pyinstaller

pyinstaller --add-data "VERSION:." --onefile ./imapbox.py  

MacOS (zsh)

Within the same Py-Env, do:

pip install --no-cache-dir  pyinstaller

pyinstaller --add-data "VERSION:." --onefile ./imapbox.py  --icon .\resources\logo.icns

Windows (Powershell)

Within the same Py-Env, do:

pip install --no-cache-dir  pyinstaller

pyinstaller --add-data "VERSION:." --onefile .\imapbox.py  --icon .\resources\logo.ico

The resulting executable will be generated into the ./dist folder.

Test with the Dockerfile

Use the test file to check if everything works as expected:

docker compose -f ./docker-compose.local-test.yml  up

Note, the following must exist:

./tmp/backup/       -- folder to backup to
./tmp/config.cfg    -- config to use

If you run this multiple times, remove the previously generated images and containers.

Build own docker image and deploy to dockerhub

1. Create a new repository at Docker Hub
2. docker login
3. docker build -t imapbox:latest .
4. docker tag imapbox:latest [USERNAME]/imapbox:$(cat VERSION)
5. docker tag imapbox:latest [USERNAME]/imapbox:latest
6. docker push [USERNAME]/imapbox:$(cat VERSION)
7. docker push [USERNAME]/imapbox:latest

Pushing to Docker Hub requires the image name ("username/imapbox") to be exactly what the website shows in "Docker commands".

Similar projects

NoPriv is a python script to backup any IMAP capable email account to a browsable HTML archive and a Maildir folder.

License

The MIT License (MIT)