Dump IMAP inbox to a local folder in a regular backupable format: 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.

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

Imapbox was designed to archive multiple mailboxes in one common directory tree, copies of the same message spread knew several account will be archived once using the Message-Id property.

This script requires Python 3.4 for master branch or python 2 on the python2 branch and the following libraries:

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

To install the required dependencies, run:

pip install -r requirements.txt

• I use the script to merge all my mail accounts in one searchable directory on my NAS server.
• 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.

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

Example:

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

[account1]
host=mail.autistici.org
username=username@domain
password=secret
ssl=True

[account2]
host=imap.googlemail.com
username[email protected]
password=secret
remote_folder=INBOX
port=993

Possibles parameters for the imapbox section:

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:

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 index:

#!/bin/bash
cd emails/
for ID in */ ; do
    curl -XPUT "localhost:9200/imapbox/message/${ID}?pretty" --data-binary "@${ID}/metadata.json"
done

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

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

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")'

version: '3'
services:

  imapbox:
    image: mauricemueller/imapbox
    container_name: imapbox
    volumes:
      - imapbox_data:/var/imapbox
      # change the path to the config
      - ./test/config.cfg:/etc/imapbox/config.cfg

volumes:
  imapbox_data:

docker-compose run --rm imapbox

1. docker login
2. docker-compose build
3. docker tag imapbox:latest [USERNAME]/imapbox:latest
4. docker push [USERNAME]/imapbox:latest

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

The MIT License (MIT)