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Summary: Relying on free email services - even GMail - can be an unnecessary risk. Fortunately GMail makes it possible, even easy, to backup your email.
You've mentioned backing up GMail to somewhere on your own computer; how do you do that?
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Of all the current free email services, GMail is my favorite. I know I've railed against free email services as your only email service, but they definitely have their place. And GMail is the service I recommend.
In part, I recommend it because I can answer this question. GMail is easy to backup.
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In a nutshell, the way to backup GMail to your own machine is to use a "traditional" email client, like Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird or others, and configure them to use GMail's POP3 access to download your mail.
Now, depending on how you use GMail there are a couple of approaches to doing this.
First let's set you up with POP3 access.
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POP3 is the way traditional email programs that run on your PC get your email from your ISP. One of the reasons I recommend GMail is that they support using POP3 to download mail from your GMail account.
To start, you'll need an email program. Chances are you already have Outlook Express on your machine, and while that's better than nothing I actually recommend Thunderbird, also free, as good, reliable and feature rich email program. Perhaps most importantly for our backup purposes, your email in Thunderbird is stored as text files rather than Outlook Express's proprietary and somewhat error prone DBX files.
Once you have an email program, GMail's online help has instructions for configuring POP3 access in many popular email programs. Here are instructions for configuring Thunderbird.
Once configured, when you go do download or "check for new mail" using your email program you'll get your GMail. The first time it could be a lot, depending on how long you've been using GMail and how much email you have.
Do that periodically, and the mail that's store on your machine is your backup should you ever lose anything from GMail. You might even consider backing up those files along with your regular PC backups.
And of course, you could consider simply using your email program instead of the GMail web interface, since you now have that as an option.
If at any time you want to re-download all the mail in your GMail account, you can. GMail help includes instructions to backup all mail by forcing GMail to download all email, even that which might have been downloaded before. That's a good way to create a snapshot at any point in time.
Article C2999 - April 19, 2007
What I don't understand is, if you delete an email on your gmail, wont it also delete that same email on Thunderbird? So how does that backup your gmail emails?
22-Apr-2010
Posted by: Gary at April 20, 2010 9:18 PM
I already use thunderbird to access my gmail through IMAP. But I would also like to use this technique to backup gmail through POP3. It doesn't seem that Thunderbird will let me -- it keeps saying that I already have an email account set up for this email address, my IMAP one, and it won't let me create another one for POP. Can I still use your POP method for backup?
Posted by: Michael at May 6, 2010 7:52 AMthanks
ok good tip about backing up your email.
Posted by: Stefaan at May 18, 2010 11:25 PMHOWEVER i used Thunderbird and i can see that it only downloaded last years mail .
so i did it on 15 may and the first mail I have on my disk is the one of 7may 2009...but i started using Gmail in 2006 all that mail still is at google's and not in my thunderbird
Question ? how do I download the earlier mail?
I cannot find any settings or options who forces thunderbird to go back at the very beginning...
Outlook has the same preset limit...
I HAVE ALREADY DELETED MY GMAIL ACCOUNT BUT I WAS NOT AWARE OF BACKUP, SO I HAVE LOST ALL THE PHOTOS IN PICASO .HOW TO RETRIVE IT PLZ HELP.
Posted by: jaishree at July 26, 2010 4:41 AMthnkzzzzzz ur article was really helpful!!!!!!!!
Posted by: anushka at July 31, 2010 8:59 AM