Backing Up Gmail With Synology

I joined Gmail back when the beta had just launched touting a whopping 1GB of storage. I thought this was a massive leap in email technology at the time. I was lucky enough to get an invite shortly after. Not suprisingly, I have many years of emails, attachments, and photos. I certainly do not want to lose the content of many of these emails.

Despite the redundancy of the data that Google secures, I still feel better retaining a copy of this data on my own physical machines. I am aware of tools such as gmvault and have used it in the past with success. I have more recently been in interested in constantly syncing and snapshotting my personal data. I’ve setup Synology’s Cloud Sync and keep copies of most of my cloud data.

The thought of completely de-googling has crossed my mind on occassion. The convenience coupled with my admiration of their engineering has prevented me from doing so thus far. Though, I may end up doing so at some point in the future.

Synology MailPlus Server

Synology’s MailPlus seems to be a good candidate for backing up this data. By enabling POP3 fetching, it’s possible to both retroactively and continually fetch these emails. If a disaster ever did occur, having these emails would be hugely beneficial.

Installing MailPlus can be done from the Package Center:

Next, go into Synology MailPlus Server and on the left, click on Account and ensure the user you desire is marked as active.

Afterwords, simply follow these instructions in order to start backing up gmail emails.

When entering the POP3 credentials, I created an app password solely for authenticating to POP3 from the Synology device. This is required because I have 2-Step verification enabled on my account. There doesn’t seem to be a more secure way to access POP3 at the moment. It does sound like these 16-digit passcodes are limited in scope for what they can access when MFA is enabled.

I made sure to set the Fetch Range to All in order to get all emails from the beginning of time.

After this, mail started coming in.

Searching through emails also worked quite quickly. I’ll test the search again after the 19 years of emails finally finish syncing.

Securing Synology

Since Synology devices are not hermetically sealed, it’s a good idea to secure them by enabling MFA to help prevent being the victim of ransomware. It is also wise to backup your device’s settings and volumes to the cloud using a tool such as Hyper Backup.

Summary

Having backups is essential for almost everything. Backing up your cloud data shouldn’t be any different. I certainly feeel more at ease having done this.