Back up your Gandi mailboxes
Gandi ships solid mailboxes with your domains. What it does not do is find the message a user deleted last month. istorel connects over IMAP and keeps what has left the server.
What Gandi does, and what stays on you
Gandi hosts the mailbox, filters the spam, and serves IMAP properly. Mail comes with the domain, which is convenient and has a side effect: the day the domain moves, the mailboxes follow, and their history with them.
Deletion stays your problem. An emptied trash is emptied, and a message deleted three months ago exists nowhere any more, except in a backup that copied it first.
The settings
Nothing to install at Gandi. istorel connects like a mail client, read-only.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| IMAP server | mail.gandi.net |
| Port | 993, SSL/TLS |
| Username | the full mailbox address |
| Password | the mailbox password |
If you move host one day
That is the other reason to back up a Gandi mailbox. A mail migration almost always goes well, and « almost » is the expensive word: a forgotten folder, a shared mailbox nobody declared, an account closed the day before.
A backup taken before the migration settles it. It stays readable and searchable afterwards, whoever the new host is.
Questions
- Do I need to enable anything at Gandi?
- No. IMAP is on by default on Gandi mailboxes. You need the full address and the mailbox password.
- What about aliases and forwards?
- An alias stores nothing, so there is nothing to back up. It is the destination mailbox that gets declared.
- How long do you keep messages?
- We delete nothing. A message removed from your server stays in the backup, readable and downloadable, whatever its age.
- Where are the backups stored?
- In France, on OVHcloud object storage, replicated across three independent availability zones.