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joeyates / imap-backup

Backup and Migrate IMAP Email Accounts
MIT License
1.33k stars 74 forks source link

How does this work with duplicate email under different labels? #110

Closed slhck closed 2 years ago

slhck commented 2 years ago

This is more of a question. I use Gmail, and most if not all my email is labeled. However, the special [Gmail]/All Mail folder will also contain all of those emails. At least when I browse it, I can see all labeled messages.

What will this tool download? Will it download each unique email, thus leading to essentially creating two copies of each email (the one in All Mail, and the one under its specific label)?

What is going to happen to messages with two or more labels?

Thanks for providing this utility!

joeyates commented 2 years ago

Hi @slhck

imap-backup downloads in terms of IMAP folders and ignores labels.

Duplicate emails in different folders will get downloaded multiple times. I think the idea of folder blacklists (in #87) may be the best way to only back up what you need.

slhck commented 2 years ago

I see, thanks for clarifying! In that case there may be some duplicates (e.g., think a message labeled as invoices and family), but that's probably not a huge practical issue. So I'll close this for now.

There might be a possibility to de-dupe based on a database of Message-IDs: if a message has already been downloaded, it will simply be referenced by its ID. That however requires setting up an additional index for the downloaded data …