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<h1 class='title'>Backing Up Gmail With Synology</h1>
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<span class='screen-reader-text'>Posted on </span>
<time class='entry-date' datetime='2022-03-13T18:49:10-04:00'>2022, Mar 13</time>
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3 mins read
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<p>I&rsquo;ve used gmail since the beta 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 fairly quickly. 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.</p>
<p>The thought of completely de-googling has crossed my mind on occassion. The convenience coupled with my admiration for their engineering has prevented me from doing so thus far. Though, I may end up doing so at some point in the future.</p>
<h2 id="synology-mailplus-server">Synology MailPlus Server</h2>
<p>Synology products are reasonably priced for what you get (essentially a cloud-in-a-box) and there is very little maintenance required. I&rsquo;ve recently been in interested in syncing and snapshotting my personal data. I&rsquo;ve setup <a href="https://www.synology.com/en-ca/dsm/feature/cloud_sync">Synology&rsquo;s Cloud Sync</a> and keep copies of most of my cloud data.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;ve used tools such as <a href="http://www.gmvault.org">gmvault</a> with success in the past. Setting this up on a cron seems like a viable option. However, I don&rsquo;t really need a lot of the features it offers and do not plan to restore this data to another account.</p>
<p>Synology&rsquo;s MailPlus seems to be a good candidate for backing up this data. By enabling POP3 fetching, it&rsquo;s possible to fetch all existing emails, as well as periodically fetch all new emails. If a disaster ever did occur, having these emails would be beneficial, as they are an extension of my memory bank.</p>
<p>Installing MailPlus can be done from the Package Center:</p>
<p><img src="/images/backing-up-gmail-with-synology/install-mailplus-server.png" alt="image"></p>
<p>Next, I went into <strong>Synology MailPlus Server</strong> and on the left, clicked on <strong>Account</strong> and ensured my user was marked as active.</p>
<p>Afterwords, I followed <a href="https://kb.synology.com/en-in/DSM/tutorial/How_should_I_receive_external_email_messages_via_MailPlus">these instructions</a> in order to start backing up emails.</p>
<p>When entering the POP3 credentials, I created an <a href="https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords">app password</a> solely for authenticating to POP3 from the Synology device. This is required because I have 2-Step verification enabled on my account. There doesn&rsquo;t seem to be a more secure way to access POP3 at the moment. It does seem like app password access is limited in scope (when MFA is enabled). These app passwords can&rsquo;t be used to login to the main Google account.</p>
<p>I made sure to set the <code>Fetch Range</code> to <code>All</code> in order to get all emails from the beginning of time.</p>
<p>After this, mail started coming in.</p>
<p><img src="/images/backing-up-gmail-with-synology/mail-plus-incoming-mail.png" alt="image"></p>
<p>After fetching 19 years worth of emails, I tried searching for some emails. It only took a few seconds to search through ~50K emails, which is a relief if I ever did have to search for something important.</p>
<h2 id="securing-synology">Securing Synology</h2>
<p>Since Synology devices are not hermetically sealed, it&rsquo;s best to secure them by <a href="https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/How_to_add_extra_security_to_your_Synology_NAS#x_anchor_id8">enabling MFA</a> to help prevent being the <a href="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/qlocker-ransomware-returns-to-target-qnap-nas-devices-worldwide/">victim of ransomware</a>. It is also wise to backup your system settings and volumes to the cloud using a tool such as <a href="https://www.synology.com/en-ca/dsm/feature/hyper_backup">Hyper Backup</a>.
Encrypting your shared volumes should also be done, since unfortunately <a href="https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/12/post/144665">DSM does not support full disk encryption</a>.</p>
<h2 id="summary">Summary</h2>
<p>Having backups of various forms of cloud data is a good investment, especially in these <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Ukraine_cyberattacks">uncertain times</a>. I certainly feel more at ease for having backed up my emails.</p>
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<span class='screen-reader-text'>Tags: </span><a class='tag' href='/tags/degoogle/'>degoogle</a>, <a class='tag' href='/tags/synology/'>synology</a>, <a class='tag' href='/tags/gmail/'>gmail</a>, <a class='tag' href='/tags/backup/'>backup</a>, <a class='tag' href='/tags/ransomware/'>ransomware</a></div>
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