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:

File	Description
message.html	If an html part exists for the message body. the message.html will always be in UTF-8, the embedded images links are modified to refer to the attachments subfolder.
message.pdf	This file is optionally created from message.html (or message.txt if message.html not exists) when the wkhtmltopdf option is set in the config file.
message.txt	This file contain the body text if available in the original email, always converted in UTF-8.
message.json	Various informations in JSON format, date, recipients, body text, etc... This file can be used from external applications or a search engine like Elasticsearch.
message.eml	A raw version of the email in .eml format.
attachments	The attachments folder contains the attached 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.

Install

Local running script

This script requires Python 3 for master branch and the following libraries:

• six - required for config parsing
• chardet – required for character encoding detection.
• unidecode – required for directory unicode creation.
• pdfkit – optionally required for archiving emails to PDF.
• crython – optionally required for running as permanent cron (see cron.py).

Docker container (as cronjob)

1. Build the container image

docker build -t imapbox .

2. Create a config

touch config.cfg

3. Run the container

docker run -d \
    -v $(pwd)/test:/var/imapbox \
    -v $(pwd)/config.cfg:/etc/imapbox/config.cfg \
    imapbox

4. Add your accounts ([account1] ...) to config.cfg, the [imapbox] is not reqired if you use environment variables for the container

Environment variables

• IMAPBOX_CRON_EXPR cronjob expression see crython#usage and crython#keywords
• IMAPBOX_DAYS see config.cfg section [imapbox] value for days
• IMAPBOX_LOCAL_FOLDER see config.cfg section [imapbox] value for local_folder
• IMAPBOX_WKHTMLTOPDF see config.cfg section [imapbox] value for wkhtmltopdf
• IMAPBOX_JSON see config.cfg section [imapbox] value for json

Use cases

• 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.

Config file

You can use one of the following locations:

• ./config.cfg
• ~/.config/imapbox/config.cfg
• /etc/imapbox/config.cfg

Example:

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

[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

The imapbox section

Possibles parameters for the imapbox section:

Parameter	Description
local_folder	The full path to the folder where the emails should be stored. If the local_folder is not set, imapbox will download the emails in the current directory. This can be overwritten with the shell argument -l.
days	Number of days back to get in the IMAP account, this should be set greater and equals to the cronjob frequency. If this parameter is not set, imapbox will get all the emails from the IMAP account. This can be overwritten with the shell argument -d.
wkhtmltopdf	(optional) The location of the wkhtmltopdf binary. By default pdfkit will attempt to locate this using which (on UNIX type systems) or where (on Windows). This can be overwritten with the shell argument -w.
json	(optional) If false, message.json will not be generated -j.

Other sections

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:

Parameter	Description
host	IMAP server hostname
username	Login id for the IMAP server.
password	(optional) The password will be saved in cleartext, for security reasons, you have to run the imapbox script in userspace and set chmod 700 on your ~/.config/mailbox/config.cfg file. The user will prompted for a password if this parameter is missing.
remote_folder	(optional) IMAP folder name (multiple folder name is not supported for the moment). Default value is INBOX. You can use __ALL__ to fetch all folders.
port	(optional) Default value is 993.
ssl	(optional) Default value is False. Set to True to enable SSL

Metadata file

Property	Description
Subject	Email subject
Body	A text version of the message
From	Name and email of the sender
To	An array of recipients
Cc	An array of recipients
Attachments	An array of files names
Date	Message date with the timezone included, in the RFC 2822 format
Utc	Message date converted in UTC, in the ISO 8601 format. This can be used to sort emails or filter emails by date
WithHtml	Boolean, if the message.html file exists or not
WithText	Boolean, if the message.txt file exists or not

Elasticsearch

The message.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

Search in emails without indexation process

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")'

Similar projects

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

License

The MIT License (MIT)