PostieDay 52 · 21 October 2026
Chapter 2 · 19 days to the chapter deadline
- Email Backup / IMAP Archiving and Regretting My Life Choices
As I write this I am performing an IMAP email backup for a client and it has cemented by my experience dealing with IONOS and trying to upgrade their account and not being able to.
A client has an org with about 70 email addresses (out of a possible 500 for their plan). Most of these are 2GB in size. Most of these can have storage added on if they need. They pay for 5 extra 10GB storage upgrades for the most active accounts. This however doesn't apply to their own email which is on the "business plan" which means they get 50GB. If they go over that limit they can't then add more storage to their account...
A client basically said they were out of space. Couldn't send email and asked for help (after checking with Gemini first - lol). I said "No problem leave it with me". Here I am 3 hours later... I'm running a email archiving docker container because I couldn't upgrade storage. The only way forward was to delete previous emails. Not doing that before running a full backup and archive though... so here we are. Thankfully IMAP pulls oldest emails first so by the time I set up and verified things were working the first gigabyte of emails were archived and so could be deleted restoring the clients email faster than waiting for the whole thing to archive (2 more hours is a nope when it's already 10PM). If the last few days has taught me anything it's that sleep is paramount above all else.
What this experience has solidified for me is that painless backup has to be essential for Postie. The customer has to be able to backup their emails, files, contacts or whatever easily. Also that storage upgrades have not to be capped to some arbitrary "plan limitation" especially if you give accounts on cheaper plans the ability to upgrade their storage in the first place... what even.