Backing Up Email

Question

What's a good way to backup old emails? In my case, I own a domain name that forwards all email to a Gmail account. I'm afraid that Gmail will one day go away, start charging, or lose my emails. It'd be nice to have the ability to search the emails that have been archived.

Thanks

Answer 1

You could retrieve all your e-mail to your machine through IMAP/POP3 and backup locally using your mailing agent (Thunderbird, Outlook...)

Answer 2

I think this is a bit paranoid, because gmail is used by a lot of companies worldwide (it's a feature of gmail). If you have a domain, gmail can handle all the mails for it. It's very unlikely that gmail stops its activity in the next decade.

Anyway, it's always a good idea to store data in (at least) 2 different locations. In the case of gmail, the simplest way to "backup" existing mails is to use an IMAP client which will replicate everything that's currently on the server (mails, folders, and a lot of informations), without deleting anything on the server.

Answer 3

I use getmail to periodically download the email by POP to a set of folders on my backup drive. GMail can be configured such that it doesn't delete or archive emails when they're downloaded, so it has no effect on the web interface.

Answer 4

We have been using Google Hosted email that provides emails hosting for our company. All our mails are retrieved through to our local computer through IMAP/POP3 with Outlook and backed up locally to DVD.

If you are able to download your emails, then you should consider backing them up to DVDs or other media.