Update on Project Unclouding. (Story time, mostly.)

It’s been a while, but it does not mean I stopped with my little charade to get my head data out of the cloud.

My Nexcloud is happily chugging along. I had some initial problems running the server, it becoming unresponsive frequently. This was of course due to some broken caching combind with broken monitoring, essentially resulting in problems that I caused, but at least never detected in time, you know how this goes. But it’s sorted now.

The next task was copying my old emails… and I mean old. I make a habit out of keeping old stuff. Even when I switched to Gmail back in the day, I took the effort to copy my old (and I mean old) emails to Gmail. It’s funny now to see emails from 20 years ago sent to or from my mailbox.hu or freemail.hu addresses… I even saw some hszk.bme.hu ones from university!

Of course initially I wanted to take the easy road and just copy stuff over in a Thunderbird. Then, realising this won’t be so easy with the amount of old emails on my home internet connection (assuming it’s a speed problem), I decided my next best option is to (and bear with me here) create a vm in my cloud, complete with (warning: graphical content) gui and xrdp, log in remotely, and do the same Thunderbird thing, this time on a Gigabit connection. Of course this got me some experience and laughs, but no emails. Thunderbird, I find, kind of just hangs if you try to copy 100k+ emails offline between 2 IMAP folders. (Makes a good CPU benchmarking tool in the process too.)

So finally I chose the path that I initially thought would be complicated, but of course which turned out to be easy way: the command line.

First off, for this to work I had to (temporarily) unsecure my Gmail a bit:

Command line doesn’t play nicely with Google’s OAuth.

Then:

sudo apt install larch
screen
larch --

(I decided that the 2 folders I want to copy over from Gmail are All Mail, and Sent. Realising that Sent is part of All Mail, but that’s fine, and it’s easier this way.)

Then… I was done! Of couse Larch was copying for a while in the screen, but that’s fine — the good thing about screen is you can go live your life while it’s active in the background.

I love Linux.

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