Backup Your Gmail Account Messages With Ubuntu and Fetchmail

Long title, I know. Here's how I did it...
sudo apt-get install fetchmail postfix
cd
nano -w .fetchmailrc
Add the following to the file (replacing everything in CAPS appropriately):
poll pop.gmail.com with proto POP3 and options no dns
user 'YOUR_GMAIL_ADDRESS' there with password 'YOUR_PASSWORD' is \
'YOUR_UBUNTU_USERNAME' here options ssl
Now:
chmod 710 .fetchmailrc
sudo nano -w /etc/crontab
Add the following to your crontab file:
10 7 * * 1 YOUR_UBUNTU_USERNAME fetchmail -k
This will run fetchmail every Sunday and grab your email. It seems either fetchmail or gmail limits each connect to something around 400-500 messages, so to get started, you can run "fetchmail -k" a few dozen times to download all your mail, then let crontab do the rest on a weekly basis. Your mail is downloaded to a single mbox file in /var/spool/mail/YOUR_UBUNTU_USERNAME. Being a single file makes it nice for backing up, moving, etc. I hear Thunderbird can easily read the file, and I think Apple Mail.app can as well. Just makes you feel good having all your mail backed up, now doesn't it?

Social Networking for Your Church

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Starting around mid- to late-2006, I started a little project for my church. The idea was to rewrite our existing online membership directory to make it more searchable and to take a stab at creating something somewhat social, where people can easily communicate with each other and also see their interests and such. Plus, I was dying to build something significant with Ruby on Rails, my new favorite web framework. As the application got closer to completion, I started showing friends and family my creation and getting feedback. The application grew. And grew. At the time, I was heavy into using Facebook to meet up with old friends and new, and started to see the value in connecting people online in ways that just don't happen offline. And the application grew. And grew. The application went online the very first day of 2007, and it was a hit. The tech-savvy people in our church got it right away. While others took awhile. For the past year, the site has been humming along, and we've made several big changes as we got feedback, complaints, etc. We worked with people, classes, and small groups in our church to teach them how to use the site and got more feedback. I'm very proud of the product we have today, and I think it's time to give it to the community. This week, I have worked to get OneBody out on the web and ready for use by other churches. I'm praying for a strong, friendly community to grow around OneBody so it becomes the absolute best of its kind. Though I have to say, I still haven't found anything quite like it, especially not free!