Yesterday’s New York Times had a scary article about the very real possibility of being locked out of your Gmail account.
| Quote: |
| Discussion forums abound with tales of woe from Gmail customers who have found themselves locked out of their account for days or even weeks. They were innocent victims of security measures, which automatically suspend access if someone tries unsuccessfully to log on repeatedly to an account. The customers express frustration that they can’t speak with anyone at Google after filling out the company’s online forms and waiting in vain for Google to restore access to their accounts. |
The best strategy to deal with this danger is backing up your Gmail account. Along those lines, the helpful folks over at Lifehacker offered up this method for Gmail backup in Windows using fetchmail.
Problem is that there are at least 15% of all computer users that don’t use Windows. For the rest of us that live in the *nix (unix, linux, BSD, Mac OS X, etc.) world, I discovered George Donnelly’s helpful guide.
It’s important to know that Gmail limits how much can be downloaded at one time, so you might have to do your initial backup a few times to catch all your data.
Hopefully, Gmail will never be a bother, but it’s always good to be prepared.
