Ever since I started using GMail as my mail client, I wanted to have an automatically synchronized local (off-line) copy of my GMail account. Such a copy would not only serve as a backup, but would also come in handy when I needed to consult messages when I’m without internet connection. It would also allow me to efficiently check my e-mail when I only have very limited (and expensive) bandwidth, or simply to find out which messages take up most space on my account.
With the arrival of IMAP support for GMail, it has become possible to efficiently synchronize your mailboxes, without having to jump through loops or downloading your whole history over POP3 every time you synchronize. While looking for an IMAP synchronization tool, I stumbled upon a post referring to mbsync, a tool which did exactly what I wanted. The post itself only talked about synchronizing your messages as a flat list, and did not talk about synchronizing labels. When trying to synchronizing all my mail, including labels, I bumped into some caveats of mbsync. Luckily, these problems can easily be fixed.
