How do I backup my AOL email?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #84 I look at a way to backup online email using an email client
and IMAP on your local PC.

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Backing up online email?

Actually I do and it turns out, from my little bit of research, that AOL probably supports this trick.

Here’s what you do: you get yourself a desktop email program like Thunderbird, or Outlook, or any of a number of others.

Download using IMAP

Make sure that whichever one you choose supports the IMAP email protocol. That allows you to connect your desktop email program to your email server in a way that preserves things like folders.

So what you end up doing is: you install and configure your desktop email program on a PC (I’ll use Thunderbird as my example), and configure it to access your AOL email account using IMAP.

Once you do so, it should begin downloading all of your AOL email. It may take awhile – depending on how much email you have, and how fast your internet connection is – but the bottom line is that it will make a copy of the email on to your PC.

That’s one backup.

Your regular backup schedule

Now, of course, you are backing up your PC on a regular basis as well. So you now get a second backup – by virtue of however you’re backing up your PC.

That’s the technique I actually recommend for backing up almost any online, web-based, or Cloud-based email account that supports the IMAP protocol.

In fact, it’s what I do myself. I have a machine in my basement and one of the things that it does is that it runs Thunderbird 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s connected to my email accounts, it’s connected to my wife’s email accounts, and what it does is it downloads all of the email as it comes in to that PC.

You can still work online

I never actually access it that way. I tend to use the web interface for most of what I need. But if I ever need to find a message that I can’t find online, or if I lose my internet connectivity for some reason, I’ve got it there.

And yes, if I end up accidentally deleting something in the Cloud – IMAP will reflect that deletion to the PC. That’s why I also point out that you have a second backup; the backup you’re making of your PC presumably every night, once a week, however often you do it.

That backup you’re making then will presumably have the backups of your mail folders before that delete happens, or you would go back to a backup copy that happened before that mail was deleted.

Either way, you have access to your email on your desktop – in your desktop’s backup programs – in addition to the Cloud.

(Transcript lightly edited for readability.)