Panix Help System: Downloading Mail

Downloading Your Mail

Today's POP and IMAP clients download your mail directly from the client, so there is no longer any need for a special procedure to download your inbox.

It used to be that people wanting to download their email would ask us where their inbox was located.

If you haven't changed the defaults, your inbox is $HOME/.maildir/. That is actually a symbolic link from your home directory to a file server accessible not only from your home directory, but also via the mail server, which provides POP, webmail, and IMAP access.

The inbox is a directory these days. If you need to download mail via means other than POP or IMAP, you might first want to save it to the older style of folder (called mbox). The easiest way to do this is to open your mail with a shell client (Pine or Mutt are easiest in this respect), tag the messages you wish to download and copy or save those messages to an old-style folder. In Pine, this would be any of the folders in your "mail" directory. In Mutt, it will be any filename that you provide.

Then you can simply download the folder using FTP or any other downloading technique available to you.