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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.
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. • 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. • 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 configured, when you go do download or 'check for new mail' using your
email program you'll get your GMail."
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. Related:
Article 11386 | Posted April 19, 2007 |
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If you`re using Hotmail and Thunderbird, a useful extension is (strangely enough) WebMail.
Posted by: David at April 21, 2007 12:07 AMhttp://webmail.mozdev.org/
Although Hotmail is not supposed to be a POP service, this extension works fine and downloads my Hotmail.co.uk and Yahoo.co.uk accounts to Thunderbird seamlessly. Also claims to be able to deal with five other web mail domains as well, but I can`t vouch for those!
Thunderbird 2 makes it even easier to download GMail messages since they have a special option for setting up Google Mail access. I think all you need to give Thunderbird now is your username and password and Thunderbird handles all the server settings and port settings for you. (Although since I upgraded from Thunderbird 1.5 where I already have Gmail setup I haven't actually setup a Google Mail account on Thunderbirds 2 yet - I have seen the new option)
Eli
Posted by: Eli Coten at April 21, 2007 04:33 PMI backup my Gmail account in a different, yet easier method. I created another email account (yahoo), and using the Gmail rules, all incoming GMail emails are automatically forwarded to the yahoo email account. I also use this backup method for files I want to keep. I email the file to Gmail, which automatically forwards to yahoo. I then have the file located on three different places: my own PC, Gmail & Yahoo. I do not use this method for proprietary files.
Posted by: PG Wolfe at April 23, 2007 07:25 AMNot sure what it does you're trying to show? But I want to access a gmail account which I forgot password. Will your method work? and how? thanks
Posted by: B at May 7, 2007 02:11 PMWhat does this backup backup? Only mails, that are in inbox? What about mails that are in send folder?!? Or mails that are in archive folder? Drafts?
Posted by: Bostjan at May 9, 2007 12:00 PMI am frustrated with the fact that I only have list of e-mails that I have send out in my inbox not recieved ones. It is always me, someone. I want to see recieved e-mails not just the one I have send out. could you please help.
Posted by: farah at February 5, 2008 10:48 AMWe have developed a simple tool ( http://www.gmail-backup.com/ ) to back up your emails from Gmail. It is written in Python but it is compiled into an EXE file for windows. As a result, you do not have to install anything. It is still only command line tool but very soon it will have GUI. You can also use it for migration or restoration of your Gmail Account. We hape that very soon it will be "one click solution". ;-)
Posted by: Filip at May 21, 2008 03:45 AMcan i read my inbox even if im offline?
Posted by: wesley at June 4, 2008 06:18 AMHaving been a fan of firefox and seen you post, I was greatly encouraged and used Thunderbird2.0 to backup my gmail. My gmail is fairly large (2GB) and, in more than 1 day, I downloaded 60% of it, and the program crashed. I tried to resume the backup, the program re-started by repeating the download right from the first email again. Tried all kinds of solutions suggested in the internet including uninstalling and wipe the program from the system and re-installing. It kept making the mistake as far as the program is interrupted while downloading the emails from gmail. After wasting 2 days, I gave up and used outlook from Microsoft, which worked perfectly. Although I really do not like Microsoft, I could not afford to waste time to just playing around with a problematic software.
Posted by: sheng at July 2, 2008 04:20 AMYou could also just set up Thunderbird to check Gmail through IMAP. It keeps it synced for you and I have had no problems with it.
Posted by: Patrick at August 11, 2008 07:29 PM