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.
Related:
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Ask Leo! - Are free email services worth it?
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Ask Leo! - How do I backup my Outlook Express email?
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Ask Leo! - How can I archive email in my free email account?
Article C2999 - April 19, 2007
can i read my inbox even if im offline?
Posted by: wesley at June 4, 2008 6:18 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 4:20 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 7:29 PMYou could also back it up using Gmail Backup.
Here is a quick how-to:
http://geekai.com/backup-your-gmail-with-gmail-backup/
Posted by: ELSHIMI at November 4, 2008 8:04 AMHow do I back up archived files; i.e., 500+ saved recipes that I've g-mailed to myself?
Posted by: Chuck at November 4, 2008 3:31 PMI found this http://www.gmailkeeper.com what interests me is that it can schedule the backup jobs and supports multiple gmail accounts.
Posted by: John at February 10, 2009 6:54 PMregarding gmail, it is my understanding that gmail does not have a "folder" system, therefore if you transfer all of your hotmail email......you will get a very long list of email and not individual folders.....havent looked at this recently, but this was my last understanding.
Posted by: amsucker at April 9, 2009 6:16 AMYou can get a free one-time Gmail backup from http://backupmymail.com
Posted by: Damon at May 20, 2009 10:32 AMfor those who couldn't re-download, do this:
Enable POP for all mail in the 'Forwarding and POP/IMAP' section of your Gmail settings
then re-run email pop3 download.
Posted by: Dennis at May 24, 2009 8:05 AMI also wrote a tutorial on how to backup Gmail using Mozilla Thunderbird:
http://www.mattsilverman.com/2009/05/backup-gmail-using-mozilla-thunderbird.html
Enjoy,
Posted by: Backup Gmail at August 22, 2009 10:18 AMMatt