A minority of Gmail users recently noticed that all of their emails were missing. Their inbox showed zero emails, and while Google was able to correct the issue later on, it was a shock for them and demonstrated that individual backup strategies are a must for cloud-based storage solutions. Users need to make sure that they have access to their emails, even if they become inaccessible online.

What can you do to protect your emails so that you won’t be losing the data in similar situations? The emails need to be backed up regularly, of course. This may sound cumbersome and complicated, and that may be true for the setting up part, but once that’s done it is not complicated or time consuming at all.

Most email providers offer Pop3 or IMAP access next to web access. These protocols are used by desktop software and mobile applications to retrieve emails from the provider. Most applications can be used for backup purposes, but they lack advanced features that may be needed. We are going to show you how to utilize the free email backup software MailStore Home for the purpose of backing up email accounts that support the POP3 or IMAP protocol.

The program can backup POP3 and IMAP mailboxes, as well as email inboxes from popular desktop clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Exchange or Thunderbird. Support for Google Mail has been integrated directly which eliminates several configuration steps when configuring a Google Mail account, more about that later.

MailStore Home displays all email archiving options on startup.

Backup Gmail Emails

Gmail users have the easiest configuration ahead of them. All they need to do is to click on Google Mail and enter their Gmail email address and password. They do however need to make sure that IMAP is enabled in Gmail. This can be done under Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP > Enable IMAP > Save changes.

MailStore Home will backup all Gmail emails to the local computer system. The emails can be read, searched and restored whenever the need arises. More about the program’s functionality later on in the guide.

Hotmail Backup

Hotmail users need to select POP3 Mailbox from the available choices. The required Hotmail Pop3 information are the following:

• Email address: The hotmail email address that needs to be backed up.
• Host: pop3.live.com
• Access-via: Select POP3-SSL
• Username: The hotmail username, usually the email address
• Password: The password of the email account

A click on Next displays the archiving options. Here it is possible to select whether the emails of the account should be deleted after backup or left untouched. The default setting is to keep all email messages. It is possible to delete all emails after archiving, x days after archiving or to delete emails that are older than a specified time period.

MailStore Home establishes a connection to the selected email host after the initial configuration has been completed. The connection and backup process is displayed in a log.

Backup Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Mail does not support Pop3, only Yahoo Mail Plus users can enable that feature. Yahoo Mail Plus users need to enable POP3 access under Options > Mail Options > Pop & Forwarding.

• Email address: The Yahoo email address that needs to be backed up.
• Host: pop.mail.yahoo.com
• Access-via: Select POP3-SSL
• Username: The Yahoomail username, usually the email address
• Password: The password of the email account

The tricks that worked in the past to add POP3 access to Yahoo Mail standard accounts do not seem to work anymore. Programs like YPOPS and setting the region to Asia worked in the past, but seem to have been fixed by Yahoo in the meantime.

Backup other emails accounts

Windows users can backup all email accounts if they support either POP3 or IMAP. Most providers disable the protocols by default which makes it necessary to enable them in the web email options. Some, like Yahoo Mail, offer these features only for premium account owners.

MailStore home Features

MailStore Home offers a search which can be used to find emails. It can furthermore import existing folders if supported so that the original layout is preserved. The advanced search is sophisticated. It is possible to search for any of the following: Subject, Message Body, Attachment contents, sender, recipient, attachment file names.

Filters are available to search only specific folders, dates, email sizes, priorities or messages with or without attachments.

Emails are displayed right in the main program window from where they can be saved or printed.

Another interesting feature is the ability to export archived emails. It is for instance possible to export them into desktop email clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Windows Mail or Thunderbird, or to an email address via SMTP.

The latter option can be used to restore deleted email addresses to the primary email client or web mail client.

It is possible to schedule backups, but not from within the program. Existing backup configurations can be saved as shortcuts to the Windows desktop. These shortcuts can then be scheduled in the Windows Task Scheduler or a comparable program to run regularly, for instance once per day or month.

Verdict

MailStore Home is a flexible email backup solution. Especially the ability to re-import email messages after backup is interesting. The free software program can be downloaded from the developer homepage over at Mailstore.com.

The main purpose of email archiving and backup software is to offer fallback copies if the emails and mailboxes in case they get corrupted or deleted on the main storage device. Many desktop email client users do not backup their mail databases regularly, which can end in disaster if the mailboxes get corrupted. The same applies to companies and businesses, but with dire consequences.

As a side effect, archived emails can be moved to another storage device or server, so that they free up disk space on the hard drive that the email client uses to store the email database.

Today we are going to show you how to speed up the email client Thunderbird, by archiving part of the stored emails. The idea is to combine backing up emails regularly, with the benefits of being able to remove emails from the email client that are old and not needed on a regular basis. In case they are needed they can still be accessed in the archiving software.

Before we start, we are going to create a full backup of the Thunderbird profile with MozBackup. Just download and run the backup software, and select to backup the Mozilla Thunderbird profile. Make sure all data is included in the backup (default settings).

backup email client

The program can later be used to restore the full Thunderbird profile in case that is needed.

Windows users have the option between several email archiving programs. For the purpose of this tutorial, we are going to use Mailstore Home. The program makes it almost foolproof to archive emails from various email clients, including Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Google Mail and general IMAP and POP3 mailboxes. The program includes options to search and read emails directly in its interface.

mailstore home

It takes only a few clicks to archive emails in MailStore Home. A click on Archive E-Mail opens the archiving page of the software. Here it is possible to select an email client or protocol from the list to launch a wizard.

The e-mail archiving wizard looks like this for Thunderbird users:

Selection of the Thunderbird profile:

The default profile is the standard profile. Most users will probably only have the default profile, unless they are working on a multi-user computer.

archive mozilla thunderbird

Customization of the archiving options:

Here it is possible to select all email folders for backup, or only specific ones. It is furthermore possible to filter emails by data or status.

archive emails thunderbird

The archiving can take some time, depending on the number of emails stored in the Thunderbird mailboxes. MailStore Home displays the saved profiles in a listing on the archive e-mail page. The program saves all information, including email attachments and headers in its interface.

We suggest to archive all emails on the first run. This is important as it makes it easier to delete emails in the email client afterwards. Delete emails? Yes, to speed up Thunderbird emails need to be removed from the client.

The next step depends on the user and the folder structure. A user only working with the inbox may want to delete all emails older than a specific age, and do the same in the sent, trash and junk folders. This should reduce the size of the mailboxes considerably in the email client.

Finally it is important to compact the folders after deleting the emails in the mail client. Like other email clients, Thunderbird does not physically remove the emails from the mailboxes after they are deleted by the user. This is done by compacting the folders.

The option is available under File > Compact Folders. Before it is selected, a folder in the mail structure needs to be selected.

Hint: It is possible to configure Thunderbird to automatically compact folders by clicking on Tools > Options, switching to the Advanced tab, there to the Network & Disk Space tab, and enabling Compact folders when it will save over x KB.

Thunderbird may start up and feel noticeably faster after archiving and deleting emails in the client. This largely depends on the amount of mails that have been stored in the client prior to the operation. A user with a few hundred mails will probably not notice a speed improvement at all, while a user with tens of thousands of emails likely will.

Do you archive or backup your emails? Let us know in the comments.

The problem is that these indexes can become corrupted over time which causes the slow downs and hangs that some user experience in the email client. The easiest way to fix this problem is to delete the msf files in the Thunderbird profile folder after closing the Thunderbird email client. Thunderbird will automatically rebuild the indexes on its next startup fixing any problems that were caused by these files.

It is of course recommended to backup the Thunderbird profile folder before deleting any files within (Check Backup Email Clients And Web Browsers).

Another possibility is to run a software program like ThunderFix. ThunderFix eliminates most of the hassles associated with the process. It will display a list of Thunderbird profiles that it found on the computer system after execution. All it takes to delete all msf files associated with the profile is to select the profile and click on the Fix Profile link.

It is again recommended to backup the profile before running the software program.

Gmail Backup will backup all Gmail mail folders and mails contained within including labels, dates and from fields. Before the backup can be started users have to enable IMAP in the Gmail settings. Once that nuisances is out of the way it is possible to backup all Gmail messages with minimal interaction. If desired a time interval can be set to restore only emails of a certain period and not all of them.

Interestingly enough emails will be stored in Microsoft’s eml format which makes it easy to import the messages into other mail clients. Gmail Backup provides an restore option to restore previously backed up emails; Not necessarily though to the same user account since the name and password of the user account can be specified freely whenever Gmail Backup is being used.

An alternative to using Gmail Backup would be to configure a regular email software client like Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook to retrieve messages from Gmail. There would not be an obvious restore option though for those messages.