In the way I personally do email, I perform an annual cleanup. When January rolls around, I download all my email, store it locally using a mail client, then back it up to media. After that I delete everything that’s stored in the web account. I pretty much have to do this because if I don’t, my email becomes unmanageable. During the course of a year if I add together both incoming (inbox) and outgoing (sent) messages, it totals to around 6,000 emails.
I recommend doing a yearly clean-out if for no other reason than to make your webmail search function more accurate. When you have a ridiculous amount of mail in your account, be it Gmail, Y! Mail, Hotmail or what-have-you, the internal message search periodically breaks because of message indexing flub-ups; this happens on all webmail systems.
You may be one of those people that has 25,000+ messages in your webmail account (and that’s being generous as I’ve actually seen 40,000+ before if you can believe it). It’s probably safe to say if you use the account regularly, very little of that bulk of mail is actually spam. You’ve probably had the account for 5 years or longer and just never bothered to clean it out.
We’ll say for the moment you want to backup and then clear out everything in your webmail account prior to 2012. Here’s how to go about it. Yes, this is a long roundabout way of doing it, but it does work.
(Note before continuing: Some of you are going to say “USE IMAP!” Wrong strategy here. Ever try to download 25,000+ messages in one shot via IMAP? Not pretty. We’re using POP.)
Create a folder called “Incoming CURRENT” in your webmail account
Move all received messages from this year 2012 to that folder.
Create a folder called “Outgoing CURRENT” in your webmail account
Go into your “Sent” folder and move everything sent out in this year 2012 to that folder.
Create a folder called “Incoming OLD”
Move all received messages 2011 and older to that folder.
Create a folder called “Outgoing OLD”
Move all sent messages (from the “Sent” folder) 2011 and older to that folder.
Make sure your inbox is EMPTY before continuing
At this point you should have moved all your mail within your webmail account to the appropriate folders, and the main inbox should be empty.
Download and install the latest version of Mozilla Thunderbird
Why Thunderbird and not Windows Live Mali? Easy answer. Thunderbird has a feature where it will automatically fill in the appropriate mail server addresses when you first set up your account. This works very well with Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! (if a Plus member) and many other webmail services.
When running Thunderbird for the first time, here’s a quick overview of how it works.
You’ll be asked if you want to sign up for a new mail account. You don’t need to do this since you already have one. Click the button “Skip this and use my existing email”:
On the next screen, enter your name, email address and email password and click Continue (for the sake of example I’m using a live.com email address, which is Hotmail):
Thunderbird should automatically detect the appropriate mail servers:
Important note before continuing: If you are presented with the option of using IMAP or POP, choose POP.
If everything looks OK, click Done.
Should the account setup be succesful, the first thing that will happen is that Thunderbird will poll the mail server to download mail. Nothing will download because your inbox is currently empty in your webmail.
Send a test message to yourself
To check and make sure everything is working OK in Thunderbird, compose a new email in Thunderbird, and send it to yourself. After the mail is sent, click the Get Mail button to retrieve the message.
Close Thunderbird
We have to go back to the webmail side and move some messages before starting the big mail download, so close Thunderbird for now.
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