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InquiringMind · 5 Sep 2020, 02:20 AM

It is not as straightforward as you would think.

I am familiar with Fastmail and I do have an account there. I am relatively unworried about their service, because I too have found them to be professional and reliable. It is my Inbox.com account that I worry about. I cannot leave them right now, and I want to find a way to routinely back them up because I have a lot of important info there with situations that are ongoing.

Fastmail's Import and Fetch functions are not as foolproof as I would hope for.

As you have written, Fetch only operates one time an hour when you are not logged into the Fastmail account and it will not Fetch from any folder other than the inbox folder of the other account. What you may not know is, if Fetch deems a message in the inbox folder of the other account to be spam, it will not retrieve that email and there is no error indication. There is no way to turn off that feature.

In the case of Import, there is no way to import one folder at a time, and if you have a large other account with many folders and many messages to import, there is a high potential for slowdown and/or failure and no way that I am aware of to restart the import to just retrieve what was not imported. So you are starting all over again.

Please do not misunderstand, I think the features that Fastmail has are very good, but they are not a great substitute for an ongoing backup type scheme.

I would like to backup the Inbox.com account regularly and hopefully in the future transition it to a new Fastmail account.

But for now, I would like to find a backup service for the Inbox.com account.

Search engines have only provided me with either software to DIY or services that are setup for corporations. My inquiries to these services have all been rejections so far. No end users accepted. Somewhere out there, I am sure that someone is offering this service to end users. I just need to find one that has a good system and reasonable price.

If I cannot find one, then I need to try to figure out which DIY software has the best track record for backing up IMAP accounts.

5 Sep 2020, 02:20 AM	#4
InquiringMind Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2015 Posts: 114	It is not as straightforward as you would think. I am familiar with Fastmail and I do have an account there. I am relatively unworried about their service, because I too have found them to be professional and reliable. It is my Inbox.com account that I worry about. I cannot leave them right now, and I want to find a way to routinely back them up because I have a lot of important info there with situations that are ongoing. Fastmail's Import and Fetch functions are not as foolproof as I would hope for. As you have written, Fetch only operates one time an hour when you are not logged into the Fastmail account and it will not Fetch from any folder other than the inbox folder of the other account. What you may not know is, if Fetch deems a message in the inbox folder of the other account to be spam, it will not retrieve that email and there is no error indication. There is no way to turn off that feature. In the case of Import, there is no way to import one folder at a time, and if you have a large other account with many folders and many messages to import, there is a high potential for slowdown and/or failure and no way that I am aware of to restart the import to just retrieve what was not imported. So you are starting all over again. Please do not misunderstand, I think the features that Fastmail has are very good, but they are not a great substitute for an ongoing backup type scheme. I would like to backup the Inbox.com account regularly and hopefully in the future transition it to a new Fastmail account. But for now, I would like to find a backup service for the Inbox.com account. Search engines have only provided me with either software to DIY or services that are setup for corporations. My inquiries to these services have all been rejections so far. No end users accepted. Somewhere out there, I am sure that someone is offering this service to end users. I just need to find one that has a good system and reasonable price. If I cannot find one, then I need to try to figure out which DIY software has the best track record for backing up IMAP accounts.