I had tons of Gmail invitations lying around, and it seems everyone already has a gmail account these days, so I was looking for a way to make some use of these accounts. Then today, due to a bug in [[http://kmail.kde.org | KMail’s]] disconnected-IMAP operation, I lost an important mail, and then it struck me! It seems like a good idea to use Gmail to backup my email. No, I’m not Newton and hundreds of others are already doing it, but it struck me today as a good idea, thats all.

However, I did things a bit different. My requirements were simple: backup all email, both incoming and outgoing, and make optimal use of Gmail’s search capability. So, I create two Gmail accounts: diwaker.received and diwaker.sent

For incoming mail, I put the following in my .procmailrc: (for explaination on how this works, see ”man procmailrc” and ”man procmailex”)


:0 c
! diwaker.received@gmail.com


For outgoing mail, (I use KMail as my client), I simply specified diwaker.sent@gmail.com as my default BCC address, and thats it, I’m all set!

Just thought some of you might find it useful :)

PS: those email addresses are not real, in case this page is harvested by bots :-D

1. GMail does From addresses!
2. Email wars
3. GMail Chat
4. Faking from address
5. GMail accounts with your own domain name