I am accessing my work email using gmail, and I need help satisfying my company's backup requirements. Help?

June 30, 2009 8:47 AM

I am accessing my work email using gmail, and I need help satisfying my company's backup requirements. Help?

We use Exchange at work (MS Exchange 2007), and I am on a mac. I don't like Entourage, so I have been accessing my email via POP on a gmail account. I am very happy with this setup.

The problem is that since it's POP, emails that I send from gmail are not synced back to the Exchange server, which means they are not backed up with all the other company emails. If I want to continue using gmail, I have to figure out a way to get my outgoing emails backed up.

Gmail cannot fetch emails via IMAP, only POP, so that's not an option.

I considered OSX Mail, Entourage and Thunderbird, but I find Gmail to be far superior.

The only option I've thought of is this... to have all my outgoing emails automatically bcc'ed to an internal email address, which we would set up just for this purpose. Then all my outgoing emails would be backed up. I haven't been able to figure out how to do this in gmail.

Can anyone help? Please don't make me use Entourage!

posted by kdern to computers & internet (19 comments total)

Um, Gmail can fetch e-mails via IMAP.

Please see here.

Seems like this would be the easiest solution.
posted by kbanas at 8:48 AM on June 30

Or BCC yourself on every sent email.
posted by Gungho at 8:54 AM on June 30

kbanas, I thought so too, but gmail only allows IMAP to access gmail with another mail client. It does not appear to be an option to use gmail to fetch emails.
posted by kdern at 8:56 AM on June 30

Gungho - I send too many emails to trust that I will remember to bcc myself every time. This has to be automatic. Any way to do it automatically?
posted by kdern at 8:57 AM on June 30

This greasemonkey script might have worked, but it's been discontinued.
posted by kdern at 9:05 AM on June 30

A filter that looks to see if the from field is your address?
posted by idb at 9:12 AM on June 30

idb has it. You can set a filter to automatically forward mail from a certain address (in this case yours) to another address.
posted by theichibun at 9:19 AM on June 30

Damn, I just noticed something. The script that kdern linked to has an updated version you can find here.
posted by theichibun at 9:21 AM on June 30

Filters only work for incoming mail, not outgoing mail. Tried that already.

I will check out the greasemonkey script... thanks.
posted by kdern at 9:22 AM on June 30

I use fastmail.fm for email. Sure, it costs money, but then again it does support IMAP for getting and receiving emails.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:40 AM on June 30

Could you not have your exchange account fetch the gmail:sent-mail folder via imap?
posted by zeoslap at 9:40 AM on June 30

There are a myriad of backup tools for gmail that package everything in your account.

I use one that can upload to a ftp server, etc... The name escapes me but I'll check when I get home. I backup my email for work to a secure folder on the company server so that I or they can track everything if the need arises. We however do not use exchange so I can't speak to that side of the equation. All I know is that the IT guy was perfectly fine with my method.
posted by Gravitus at 9:56 AM on June 30

zeoslap - I could... the downside is that all incoming emails (and attachments) would be duplicated.

gravitus - that sounds like a great solution. If you could post the info that would be great...

Also - I am on safari. I use greasekit to get greasemonkey scripts to work on safari, but it does not seem to work for the auto bcc script. Not sure why.

Ugh!
posted by kdern at 10:02 AM on June 30

Is it possible to set up a gmail backup to my company server using this? http://www.gmail-backup.com/frontpage
posted by kdern at 10:19 AM on June 30

: I considered OSX Mail, Entourage and Thunderbird, but I find Gmail to be far superior.

I do too—and I, like you, use my gmail account for work and must back it up.

There is an easy way to do this. Just use Thunderbird, like I do; you don't have to use it as an email client to use it to back up. Just set up the connection and be sure to run Thunderbird once every day or so; if you do, all received and sent emails will be downloaded from the gmail servers to your local machine when Thunderbird syncs at startup. You can do with them what you'd like, and this process ends up taking about two minutes per day, so it works great for me, anyhow.
posted by koeselitz at 11:15 AM on June 30

…but if that's not automated enough for you, and if you're up to typing in a few Unix commands (you sound like you could handle that sort of thing) you should try this process described at LifeHacker for using fetchmail through Cygwin to make this an automatic nightly process—so you never have to do anything, it's all done by the computer for you. It shouldn't be too tough; it seems like they describe all the steps in detail.

I know I'm going to try it as soon as I get home.
posted by koeselitz at 11:29 AM on June 30

Oops—you're on OSX, so Cygwin is out. Here are instructions for doing the same thing in OSX.
posted by koeselitz at 11:43 AM on June 30

koeselitz - this sounds like the best option. Do you know if it's possible to have Thunderbird store it's files on a server instead of my hard drive?
posted by kdern at 12:03 PM on June 30

Yes, it should be. In Thunderbird, just go:

Tools ->
Account Settings ->
Local Folders,

and in the ‘Message Storage’ box, set the ‘Local Directory’ to one on your server—e.g., m:\email_backup\ or something like that.
posted by koeselitz at 12:21 PM on June 30