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.

Webmail Notifier is without doubt one of the most popular Firefox email notification add-ons. It supports a wide variety of email services with some already build into the add-on and others available as userscripts.

Webmail services that can be configured right away include Google Mail (Gmail), Yahoo Mail or Live Mail (with msn, live and hotmail). Userscripts are available for GMX, Web.de, Lycos, Fastmail, QQ and Orkut among others.

New email accounts can be added in the options of the add-on after installation. The users only need to add the username and password of the email account.

Some options are available that include the frequency of email checks and if alerts should notify the user if new or unread emails have been received.

Userscripts can also be added in the options. Several userscripts to add new email providers are available at the developer’s homepage.

The Firefox add-on can be downloaded from the Mozilla website.

Other than that, though, Gmail had a ton to offer – integration with my Google Calendar, the ability to send and receive emails from a number of different accounts, and ubiquitous access to my updated email inbox from any computer.

My ultimate solution has been not one or the other, desktop or web-based, but both. Gmail is still my hub for email, but when I’m at my own computer, I’m in Thunderbird, Mozilla’s fantastic and free desktop email client. Thanks to five great add-ons, Thunderbird is able to capture almost all of the features of of Web-based Gmail, and add a couple of capabilities of its own.

Lightning/Provider for Google Calendar

One of the great things about Gmail is that, through Gmail Labs, you can put your calendar right in the sidebar next to your email. Adding and viewing calendar events is easy, and Gmail even tries to guess when someone suggests an event for you by email, and lets you put it automatically in your calendar.

All this can be replicated, and in my opinion improved, by using a couple great Thunderbird add-ons. The first is Lightning, which adds a calendar into Thunderbird, making it more of a personal information manager than just an email client. Then, by installing Provider for Google Calendar, you’ll be able to sync your Lightning calendar back and forth with Google Calendar. That way, it’s always available online, but looks and feels just like a desktop calendar within Thunderbird.

Zindus

Zindus is basically just like Lightning, but for your Google contacts. Zindus automatically syncs your Google contacts with your Thunderbird contacts, and any added or edited contacts are automatically synced to both.

Zindus is great, because it both keeps a backup of your contacts online and off, and because it means you’ve always got your contacts available to you in your application of choice.

Nostalgy

One of the fantastic things about Gmail is how easy it is to plow through your inbox – tons of great keyboard shortcuts and useful buttons let you deal with every email quickly and easily. Nostalgy, a favorite Thunderbird add-on of mine, adds much of the same to Gmail.

Using a few choice keyboard shortcuts, Nostalgy lets you move items between folders, go to folders, show and hide messages and folders, and even search through your email. You can create your own rules and scripts, to be executed by triggers in the email itself, or by a given keystroke. With Nostalgy, you can go through your Thunderbird inbox every bit as fast as in Gmail.

GmailUI

GmailUI is much like Nostalgy, in that it adds some of what makes Gmail so great into Thunderbird – the navigation shortcuts. For instance, GmailUI makes it easy to archive email in a single keystroke – which is notably missing in the normal Thunderbird interface.

GmailUI also creates shortcuts to move between messages, search in one click, and even improve Thunderbird’s ability to search using things like “to:David Pierce” to find what you’re looking for even faster.

Signature Switch

As I mentioned at the beginning, one of my favorite things about Gmail is that it handles multiple identities well – I can use personal, work, and blogging email seamlessly all within Gmail. Using a Thunderbird extension called Signature Switch, and a little known feature within Thunderbird itself, Thunderbird does the multiple identity thing even better.

First, go to “Tools”,”Account Settings” within Thunderbird. On the right side of that window, click “Manage Identities.” There you can add as many other emails as you want – Thunderbird lets you send emails from a number of different addresses, all within the same account.

The Signature Switch extension lets you create a number of different signatures for your emails, and then insert whichever one you want into your emails. It’s a simple extension, but actually handles multiple signatures for multiple addresses better than Gmail itself.

There’s something special about a desktop email application for me – I like the reading pane, I like the look and feel of the apps. The ubiquity of Web email, though, can’t be ignored. Using these extensions, I get the best of both worlds – all the goodness of Gmail in Thunderbird, and all my email and data is up-to-date in Gmail when I’m away from my computer.

What do you use for email? Thunderbird, Gmail, something else?

Basically what I am asking this time, is do you use POP3, IMAP, or webmail, or maybe even something else? POP is the “oldschool” way of doing thigs. You download the messages from the server, but you are essentially making a copy of your real inbox on the server, the message structure, messages, etc are not changed on the server, no matter what you do in your email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc).

IMAP is the method of directly accessing your server real-time from a different application. If you delete an email from your client (Outlook, Thunderbird supports IMAP as well) you selete it from your server too, and vice-versa. Webmail is of course directly accessing your server on a nice graphical interface, like Gmail, Yahoo Mail and all the others.

There are many ways to manage yourself using any of these methods, but which do you think is best? POP is great for managing emails as tasks, and to keep backups, in fact, I think it is the most productive, but since it doesn’t modify your server too, it means your server will be a mess. IMAP is great for not doing double work, but is at times a bit inflexible and harder to use if you also want advanced features like labels, tags, folders, etc. Webmail is probably a mixture of the two if you have a good interface like Gmail. So which do you prefer, how do you manage your email?

This requires some explanation. The user signs up and picks a username during the setup. The domain for his email is then created automatically using the formula @username.otherinbox.com. Every email alias that is put in front of the @ will automatically create a new filter and folder for that alias.

This effectively means unlimited email addresses for every user which are harder to guess than those from similar services such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail. This does however mean that every email will reach the inbox and that a new folder and filter will be created for them automatically.

Otherinbox can be used to send emails from the available or newly created aliases as well. The real question is if someone would really need Otherinbox. It is not a problem to create a new webmail account and create filters for marketing and networking websites. The only difference is that Otherinbox provides automatic filter generation while they have to be created manually using the other webmail services.

Is that enough to make the service worthwhile? That’s up for you decide. The Otherinbox team provided Ghacks readers with 25 email addresses. Just head over to http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup/ghacksnet and signup. The first 25 to signup get the beta account.

A component is a plugin for one of the mentioned email services which means that if you use AOL and Yahoo Mail you would download and install those two. The main advantage of webmail is that you can configure all settings in Thunderbird without having to run an external software that listens on the mail port.

Setup involves three steps. First you make sure that webmail is up and running. You do that by opening the options of webmail. It should display a graphic that looks similar to the one below.

If everything is up and running select domains from the tab bar and make sure that the webmail providers that you use are in the list. If that is the case exit the options.It’s time to create a new account to retrieve and check email from those webmail accounts.

POP3:

Server Type : POP
Incoming Server : localhost
username: your email address which has to include the domain, e.g. @yahoo.com

SMTP:

Server Name : localhost
User Name : your email address which has to include the domain, e.g. @yahoo.com

Check out the setup guide if you are unsure about this, it explains every step with pictures. My thanks to Si Howard for pointing this out. Another option would be Freepops that I wrote about as well.