[X4U] Can Apple's Mail pick up GMail?

[Neil Laubenthal]

If you're using Mail . . . it keeps a locally cached copy of your IMAP  
mailboxes . . . they live in ~/Library/Mail. So; whatever you're  
backing up your laptop with (Time Machine, Retrospect, whatever) will  
also backup the locally cached copies.

The IMAP server is a commercial entity and has way better backup than  
home users can afford. Most providers use a combination of SANs,  
RAIDs, redundant servers, and redundant network centers to ensure  
reliability for their servers. In addition; the vast majority of  
commercial mail servers are running Unix of some sort . . . so absent  
a hardware failure they simply aren't subject to the same software  
things that say a Microsoft Exchange server is. Unix also offers  
clustering capabilities . . .which means that there may be two servers  
(or even 3 or more) behind the hostname that appears to you to be the  
mail server. One server is online and they share the data; if there is  
a hardware failure in the online cluster node the standby node takes  
over and you're none the wiser. The mail servers can also be  
virtualized . . .which means that the entire mail server is  
essentially an instance of something like VMWare Fusion and the  
'server' is really just a disk image file. If the hardware it's  
running on croaks . . . the failover software restarts the virtual  
server on another physical server.

Commercial folks are pretty anal about backup and redundancy.



On Sep 30, 2008, at 23:44, Ed Gould wrote:

>
> On Sep 30, 2008, at 12:30 PM, Andrew T. Lynch wrote:
> Drew :
>
> Good description clear and concise thanks.
>
> One question that I do have  is though are you depending on the  
> server site as being able to back up/restore email? I would think  
> this is an issue no matter which method you use. With POP its up to  
> you to do backup and it has to be consistent (example every morning  
> at 3 AM) At some sites I have heard that they do NOT back up the  
> server as it is to volatile.
>
> Ed
>
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