With more and more people using web-based email (i.e. Hotmail, Yahoo, Google), one risk for people is what happens if that service crashes or loses your mail? People are always saying that you should have backups of your data, how do you backup a web based email account? Is there an easy way to do it for multiple accounts? Fortunately, I found a free service that can do backups and restores of multiple email accounts, and it also gives you the ability to quickly search your email on your computer. The company is MailStore and is available here.
How it works
You will be downloading an application that you run on your PC that will take all of your desired email accounts and put them in an archive on your computer.
The program works with Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.
The main page
The opening screen of the application looks like this (note, you can always get here by pressing the Start button at the top of the program):
The main icons
On the top right of the screen are the function icons.
The icons are:
- Get to the Main page (Start)
- Archive
- Search
- Export
- Settings
- Help
Backing up your email accounts
MailStore can backup a wide variety of email accounts from Outlook to generic POP3 and IMAP accounts (POP3 and IMAP are web based accounts – you can check with your provider to see which your provider uses). Backing up PC based email is good too in case your email file gets corrupted.
Here is an expanded view of the top of the Archive E-Mail screen listing the different email accounts that you can backup.
The settings screens are straightforward. Here are the screens to set up the Google Mail account:
Note, on this screen I add an exclusion for the All Mail folder (it is huge and I find things I need are already in one of the other folders).
Once you create the account it is put in the list, clicking on the Properties button will bring up these configuration screens again.
Searching your archive
Clicking on the search icon will bring up this screen:
Exporting your archive
You can take your email and export it into another account (for example if you want to change email providers and want to bring all of the email over to the new account):
Administrative Tools
Here is the General Settings screen:
Backing up your archive
From the main screen (which you can get to by pressing the Start button in the toolbar) you have options to backup your archive to either a CD, DVD, USB drive or another hard disk directory.
