The associated forum post URL from https://forum.rclone.org

Not needed

What is your current rclone version (output from rclone version)?

Not needed

What problem are you are trying to solve?

I was working on backing up messages on an IMAP account and I thought that an IMAP backend would be useful for rclone. In theory it could work like imapsync when source and destination are IMAP servers, and like imap-backup if one of them is a regular storage.

How do you think rclone should be changed to solve that?

Since I have been hacking rclone for a while I made an IMAP backend for testing. Right now it just connects using StartTLS (I have no idea how UAUTH works so cant test with gmail), Right now I can just do 'rclone lsf imap-server:INBOX' and get something like:

1741107643.R66688631a2e6f2251f058d551a0e915d48270dc277f3.geopod-ismtpd-12,S=14529;2,S
1741712844.R7f5fb90ad780d2001c11a317586dad7e6c7456cf0df3.geopod-ismtpd-26,S=35475;2,
1741720410.R4d68ad2aa3e3c21f1c63f8145153974f653e2ec134d5.geopod-ismtpd-26,S=35486;2,
1741732505.R476da22bf5d3cf173805bf094c4a964c711116ec32c5.notifications.google.com,S=12106;2,
Sub Folder 1/
Sub Folder 2/

File names are in maildir format, well almost. Using semi-colon instead of colon, since windows hates that in files. I have a pull request for the 'rclone archive' function. Should I do a new pull request for this or just use the same?