How is IMAP unreliable for backups?

If you want to keep the tags, take a look at heliotrope[1], a personal email server with tag support that can sync Gmail accounts.

[1]: https://github.com/wmorgan/heliotrope

I should say Thunderbird. Its IMAP implementation has always had issues downloading large volumes of mail for me.

I also live in an area where latency is normally measured in seconds, so I think you and everyone downvoting me are living in a slightly different Internet from me.

Heliotrope sounds like it might offer a good alternative without a six hour journey back to civilization.

Why would you use TB for backups? Use something designed for the job, like offlineimap. Well, or Heliotrope, which is brilliant (Sup, the other project by the same author is brilliant too, but it doesn't download, just reads a maildir).

once you have it locally you have all the time in the world to retag it.

Yeah, because manually re-entering data that exists already is just what a geek wants to do with the next few months of their life.

Not.

i'm just saying that it's not the same order of problem as not having the mail at all. also, the majority of my tags are applied using filter rules, which are relatively easy to duplicate on an offline archive.

I'd say it's a bigger order of problem than not having the mail at all. I have mounds of inadequately organized information. I don't want to add to the amount of noise I have to sort through.