Summary: Mozilla Thunderbird is a well-known email client. It supports POP, IMAP, RSS, and USENET, but did you know it also supports local mail spools?

I have three backup scripts that are cronned to run on my local system. Two run each night and one runs once a week. The two that run each night are:

• an encrypted, off-site backup using the wonderful backup tool Duplicity and for which I have written a rather rudimentary console front-end for, and
• an unencrypted plain-jane rsync/hardlink backup that goes to a local USB drive

The one that runs once a week is the full encrypted, off-site backup using Duplicity. Since the local backup makes use of hardlinks, there’s no concept of “full” or “incremental” backups.

Given that these scripts perform backups, knowing that they worked is very important to me. We all know that silent backups are almost as dangerous as no backups because if the thing doesn’t twig you every day to let you know it’s working, you will soon forget about them entirely. Until you try to do a restore and realize your backups haven’t been running for three weeks.

To give me this notification, I have a MAILTO=jdw at the top of my crontab (jdw being my local username). I then just have to ensure that each script has some kind of output (I usually just put an echo “Backup complete.” at the end of the script) and I will receive an email every time the scripts run. This is good, but it’s not perfect because in order to check if these emails are present, I have to run mail or mutt or some local email client. That’s the type of thing I forget to do and is almost as bad as a silent backup. What I need is an obvious email in my inbox.

I had an idea and took a look. I was right – it turns out that once of the account type options within the new account setup wizard in Thunderbird is a UNIX mail account (called MOVEMAIL – not sure why).

I selected this type of account and specified my username as jdw@zeus (zeus being my machine name) and blammo – I had a new mailbox with which to read my local email with. I further configured TBird to make a filter for that mailbox so that any email that comes into it is copied to my mail inbox so it will be staring me in the face rather than having to go hunt for it.

I feel so clever now.

Tags: email, thunderbird

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