How should I back up my email?
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com, where I've been backing up e-mail
and helping people to recover from lost emails since 2003.
Let's start with our question.
I have many times deleted some of my important emails from my inbox.
I was even locked out of my account when some hacker tried hacking my email.
So I was looking for a backup solution
that I can view my emails even when my email provider is down.
Do you think that dropmyemail is the way to go?
I do not want an offline backup since it's
a pain to load them all the time in case I want to get my emails back.
First off,
awesome that you're backing up your email or even just considering backing up your
email, so many people do not and it really becomes a pain when, as happened to you,
apparently a hacker comes along and steals your account, gets into your account,
where you can no longer gain access to your own account.
They can delete everything.
Or if you never regain access, all of your email is gone.
So backing it up is critical, without a doubt.
Now, I do have a different opinion on exactly how you should go backing it up.
But let's walk through some of the issues.
There are two general approaches.
One is to back up your email locally.
That's kind of the solution that you didn't want.
I prefer it, but we'll talk about that in a moment.
The idea here is that to back up your
email locally you, on a PC, install an email program like Thunderbird or
Microsoft Office's Outlook or any of a number of others and configure it
to download your email using the IMAP protocol.
What that does is downloads email,
but keeps everything in sync with what's online.
It's the protocol we actually use very often these days to allow several
different machines, including our mobile devices,
to access the same email account from multiple different places and have
changes made in one place show up in the other.
It's perfect for this scenario because all you really need to do is fire up your
email program on that PC and once it's configured, just let it run.
It magically keeps itself up to date with whatever's going on in your email as
you process your email, normally online or on other devices.
The other approach is to do kind of sort of the same thing except online.
For example, let's say you have your email with Outlook.Com online.
The approach here would be to create a different email account, say,
with Gmail, Google's mail service, but have that then configured to remotely
fetch email from your outlook.com account.
In other words, the Gmail account kind of sort of acts like a desktop email
program and that it fetches email the same way, but it's an online service.
The catch here is that there is no IMAP support.
Generally, what that means is you end up
having to configure the remote email service to use pop3.
What's critical is that you then configure
that pop3 of retrieval to quote unquote leave messages on server.
That way, the Gmail account is simply
making a copy of all your email periodically as it finds it in your
original outlook dotcom account without affecting the Outlook dotcom account.
You continue to use your email normally outlook dotcom.
But if you ever need to go back and fetch a backup copy or something from the past,
you could go over to that Gmail account and access everything you need.
Now, specifically with desktop email
programs, I have to point out that the program has to be working.
It has to be running.
What that means is that, yes,
you actually have to have Thunderbird running on a machine in order
for Thunderbird to download and backup your email Thunderbird or
Microsoft Office Outlook or whatever email program you choose.
As I record this, the machine, in fact,
I think it's over in the corner back there is my laptop.
It is, in fact, running Thunderbird right now.
It's backing up email from several
different accounts into a common Thunderbird scenario.
So that is something that's worth realizing with respect to online email
services, the Gmail fetching from Outlook.Com.
In other words, Gmail acting as a backup for your outlook.com
it's unclear.
You're going to want to sign into the Gmail account periodically,
at any rate, just to make sure you continue to have access and that it
doesn't get shut down or something because of inactivity.
I believe it'll continue to fetch all the time whether you're logged in or not.
Log in periodically anyway.
Now, putting email back gets a little bit strange.
It's something that you mentioned and it's
unfortunately easy in one case, the case you don't want and not that easy.
And the other,
if you're using a desktop email program and you are using IMAP to actually keep
everything in sync, then putting email back is actually pretty straightforward.
You simply copy it from one folder
to another on your PC that gets replicated back online and you're done.
It's all put back when it comes to pop three.
It gets really strange, really hard and really not that easy.
My solution, if I were forced into this
kind of a scenario, would actually be to set up Google's Gmail
not only to fetch email from my outlook.Com account, but I would have it be
able to send email as my outlook.com account so I could actually send
and receive emails from that account as if I were using outlook.com directly
putting things back into an outlook.com account or going to is going to be
fairly difficult, fairly cumbersome and honestly probably
involves setting up a PC using IMAP and copying emails back and forth as
the most comprehensive solution to that kind of a problem.
Now, there's one more thing I want
to point out, and this is honestly one of the bigger reasons that I really prefer
the download to a PC backup version, and that is that you're doubly protected
because, of course, you are backing up your PC regularly.
Right.
If you're not do that, you need to start doing that right away.
But the good news is that if you're using your PC to download your email as
a backup, then when you back up your PC, you're also doubly backing up your email.
That's a great way to keep things, well, extra safe and extra backed up and in many
cases allows you to retain snapshots of your email from further back in time
rather than just what you happen to have on the PC at that particular moment.
My recommendation, honestly,
is that you give serious consideration to using a PC or a Mac or whatever,
a desktop PC to download your email and back it up.
That way. That will give you the most flexibility
and allows you to be more back to be more secure about losing, you know,
potentially losing email if you want to do the online scenario.
Use any of a number of different online accounts to do that.
I've used Gmail here as my example to back up your outlook.com account.
But essentially any service that provides the ability to fetch from another account
using the top three protocol will work as a backup account as well.
As I said when I started, good on you for considering this at all.
Too many people don't.
If you are one of those people who have
not been backing up your email, please start for links related to this article.
For the article on which this video was originally based.
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Slash five nine eight three.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com.