Do You Keep All Your Mail Online? If So Download A Backup

Webmail is no doubt my preferred way to access email. Because it is available from any computer connected to the Internet (both sent and received mail) the convenience simply cannot be beat. Of course, with this convenience comes a price: you are at the mercy of the provider.

For example, if you use Gmail and it goes down for some time, with it goes your email access. For the extreme circumstance, if Google decides to completely abandon Gmail and just shuts it off, there goes all your email. Granted this situation is unlikely, but it within the rights of any free webmail provider.

To make sure you are protected from this, you should download a backup of your email. Methods available will vary depending on who you use, but I know Gmail allows you to download your email via POP and leave the message on the server. This method allows you to have copies on both Google’s server and your own machine.

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Sharron Field
There is a dedicated program for backing up your Gmail account; appropriately named “Gmail Backup”. It’s been around for some time. It includes a restore function too; which admittedly wouldn’t be much use if Google pulled Gmail, but would be useful if they lost some or all of your email from their server.
http://kkomp.com Sharron Field
Incidentally; Gmail Backup runs in Windows and Linux. There is an unsupported command-line version for Mac OSX; but they seem to be largely leaving Apple out of it for whatever reason.
Under Linux you will need the wxPython (http://wxpython.org) packages installed. It also requires the ctypes module, it should be included in the Python 2.5 distribution.
http://canadiantechblogger.com Brad
There is no need to backup my email.
It’s all newsletters so it has no value..thankfully.
http://GmailKeeper.com Edwin Yip
the free, open source Gmail backup is good. If you don’t want to input login info every time you want to make a backup, or even want to schedule the backups, or backup multiple accounts at a time, also check Gmail Keeper (it’s commercial ).
http://www.conuladh.com ConUladh
My gmail account is configured to autoforward everything to a hotmail account. I just need to make sure I access the hotmail account every so often so they don’t clear it down, I do this by having it as one of my homepage tabs.