Reasons for loving FLOSS, #<fairly large number>

As I've mentioned before, I've been poking at a gmail backup application based off libgmail. It's been making slow progress, partly because I've been distracted by other things (such as Project Euler), but it hasn't completely stalled.

Recently, while fiddling with it, though, I hit a snag - libgmail would throw an exception when trying to access certain threads. After much head scratching, and testing, I eventually twigged that the problematic threads all included messages sent via google chat. A little focussed debugging showed that gmail creates pseudo mail messages for these when accessed via the API libgmail uses that don't quite match the messages libgmail expects. A little crude patch later, and the problem was fixed for me.

Thus armed, I submitted a bug to the Debian bug tracker, at around 19:00 local time. At 21:00, I received a acknowledgement from the maintainer, who had forwarded upstream, and at 21:10, I received a note that a patch had been applied upstream. Just over 2 hours from bug report to upstream fix strikes me as pretty good going.

The Side project, or a tale of paranoia and python

This starts with a post to clug-tech (http://lists.clug.org.za/pipermail/clug-tech/2008-September/041635.html), titled "Make automatic backups of gmail account". This extracted several obvious solutions using getmail or fetchmail & gmail's IMAP service. There are obvious weaknesses with using IMAP to backup mail, though - exposing all the labels as folders is not desirable when you regularly use multiple labels per message, and any re-arrangement of mail into per month mailboxes or the like needs to be handled client side, which seems a waste given that gmail has a rather nice search engine as a major selling point.

Combine this with the following ingredients:

• I'm prone to sporadic bursts of data paranoia
• I've wanted to play with libgmail (a python interface to gmail) for ages
• I don't have a backup of my gmail account's mail
  
• work has involved lots of meetings & academic proposal writing, and not much of actual interest of late.

The result is Gparanoia, a simple little python program for pulling down mail. It's currently far from robust, and far from complete, but kinda-sorta-maybe does some of what I want some of the time, which seems the perfect point at which to turn it loose into the wild. It may very well eat your data, start a land war in Asia, or generally behave in an ill-mannered way at the dinner table, but it's available if people want to play with it.