Keeping mail on hold¶

Sometimes mail has to be kept exactly as it is: you're in a dispute with a landlord, an employer or an insurer, an accountant or a tax office has questions, or someone has asked for their data. A hold makes sure nothing mailcellar does removes that mail, from Gmail or from the backup, until you release it. This guide walks through one, with invented names.

1. Place the hold¶

Say you're disputing a deposit with a letting agent at lettings.example, and the tenancy began in September 2025:

mailcellar hold add deposit-2026 --reason "deposit dispute" \
    --party @lettings.example --after 2025-09-01

alex@example.com: hold 'deposit-2026' placed; it keeps 37 messages now
  party @lettings.example · from 2025-09-01

--party matches From, To, Cc and Bcc, so the mail you sent them is covered too. Add more --party options for other people involved (a deposit scheme, a solicitor), --label for a label you already use, or --id for particular messages. Every kind of criterion you give must match; several --party options match any of them.

The hold follows its criteria: the reply that arrives next week is held too, as soon as a backup has it. So keep your backups running (scheduled backups) while a hold is in force; report health warns if a week passes without one.

2. Carry on as usual¶

Offloading and removing duplicates go on as before, and leave the held mail alone: offload apply and dedup apply skip each held message, with held: deposit-2026 as the reason in their log.

forget doesn't forget held mail, not even with --deleted, so it stays in the backup even after Gmail deletes it. Nothing stops Gmail itself deleting a message, or you deleting it in Gmail, but the backup keeps its copy.

3. Check what it keeps¶

mailcellar hold show deposit-2026

alex@example.com: hold 'deposit-2026', in force, placed 2026-03-02
  reason: deposit dispute
  covers: party @lettings.example · from 2025-09-01
  keeps 41 messages, 2025-09-03 to 2026-04-18
  2 of them Gmail no longer has, as far as the backup knows: it holds the only copy

mailcellar verify --chain shows the backup hasn't changed since each message was recorded, and the hold itself is recorded in the same hash chain, so when it began and what it covered can't be rewritten later.

4. Hand the mail over¶

When a solicitor or an adjudicator asks for the correspondence:

mailcellar export alex --hold deposit-2026 --to ~/deposit-2026.zip

The zip has each message as an .eml file and an index of dates, senders and subjects. --to ….mbox gives one file instead, for a mail client.

5. Release it¶

Once the matter is settled:

mailcellar hold release deposit-2026

The mail is no longer held, but the hold's record stays (hold list --all), with when it was placed and released. --until DATE when placing a hold ends it by itself on that date, for a hold with a known end, such as a tax enquiry window.

Every option is in the reference.