Larch

Larch is a tool to copy messages from one IMAP server to another quickly and safely. It’s smart enough not to copy messages that already exist on the destination and robust enough to deal with ornery or misbehaving servers.

Larch is particularly well-suited for copying email to, from, or between Gmail accounts.

Installation

Install Larch via RubyGems:

  gem install larch

Usage

Larch is run from the command line. At a minimum, you must specify a source server and a destination server in the form of IMAP URIs. You may also specify one or more options:

  larch --from <uri> --to <uri> [options]

For an overview of all available command-line options, run:

  larch --help

Specify a source server and a destination server and Larch will prompt you for the necessary usernames and passwords, then sync the contents of the source’s INBOX folder to the destination:

  larch --from imap://mail.example.com --to imap://imap.gmail.com

To connect using SSL, specify a URI beginning with imaps://:

  larch --from imaps://mail.example.com --to imaps://imap.gmail.com

If you’d like to sync a folder other than INBOX, specify the source and destination folders using —from-folder and —to-folder:

  larch --from imaps://mail.example.com --to imaps://imap.gmail.com \
    --from-folder "Sent Mail" --to-folder "Sent Mail"

By default Larch will create the specified folder if it doesn’t already exist on the destination server. To prevent this, add the —no-create-folder option:

  larch --from imaps://mail.example.com --to imaps://imap.gmail.com \
    --from-folder "Sent Mail" --to-folder "Sent Mail" --no-create-folder

Credit

The Larch::IMAP class borrows heavily from Sup by William Morgan, the source code of which should be required reading if you’re doing anything with IMAP in Ruby.

Larch uses the excellent Trollop command-line option parser (also by William Morgan) and the HighLine command-line IO library (by James Edward Gray II).

License

Copyright © 2009 Ryan Grove <ryan@wonko.com>

Licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.0.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of version 2.0 of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, visit www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt or write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.