I use both gmail and gmail for my domain but I'm not wild about totally trusting access to my data to google's good will. I'm wondering if it is possible to use gmail's IMAP access to keep a real time backup of my accounts on my LAN.

What I'm thinking is set up a mail client on my LAN that keeps synced to gmail over IMAP and stores messages locally then somehow present that inbox to myself on my LAN over IMAP.

I have no intention of making this anything more than a fail safe means of accessing my mail so it doesn't need to be all that slick / production ready. I have no intention of making it web accessible. I've got a server running debian 5 on my LAN that I'd like to use. Can someone suggest packages and or configurations to accomplish my goal?

Thanks.

A fairly simple solution is to enable IMAP or POP forwarding in your gmail account (under settings) and then use an email client locally to download the emails. I do this using POP and thunderbird.

Yes this is a simple solution (and good) but gets me a copy of my mail on my desktop which isn't what I'm after. Gears could also be used to accomplish the same thing with even less difficulty. I don't want to have a 5gb mailbox sitting on my desktop and my server is configured to handle all my backup. My data protection plan is get anything important on the server and then protect the server. The idea of using a client to get it on my desktop then rsyncing the client mailbox up to the server is unappealing. I'd also like to keep the mail in a standard format (mbox, maildir) that has good migration tools available. Finally I want to be able to get at it from any computer on my LAN.

Maybe I should rephrase the question...

How can I keep a local copy of my gmail in maildir or mbox format synchronized with my account over IMAP?