Email Backup Service ???

[InquiringMind]

Hello Everyone,

Does anyone know if there are companies that offer email backup service ???

What I mean is, are there any companies that you can signup for a service where you give your email account user id, password, server address, etc., and the backup service will go into your account at a specified time and period to import the emails and drafts from all of your email account folders ???

I know that some email services offer the ability to import all of your emails from another account and also fetch new messages from your other account inbox once an hour. But I am wondering if anyone offers this import ability in an automated fashion for the purpose of backing your email account periodically to safeguard your messages in another location. A kind of cloud backup for an email account.

If you know of any, please post a reply. Thanks.

[jeffpan]

please choose gsuite, office 365 etc, they will provide you the standalone email archive/backup features.

[n5bb]

I don't know of a service which does exactly what you wish. Some services (such as Fastmail) can be used once to import all IMAP folders, but for long-term use (to my knowledge) you can only fetch messages from the single Inbox folder of the other service. I use this feature at Fastmail to fetch my outlook.com new messages. Messages are fetched every 5 minutes when logged in to the Fastmail account, otherwise every hour. They reside on the Fastmail server after they are fetched. But I believe this only works for new messages arriving in the Inbox of the other account.

In the past I used IMAPSize (https://broobles.com/imapsize/) to make local backups manually of my Fastmail account. But Fastmail is now so reliable that I don't bother.

You might be able to set up an email client such as Thunderbird to run on an independent PC so that it would fetch messages periodically from all of your folders via IMAP. There might be a service which would do something like that for you, and I'm hoping that others respond with a better solution. It's easy to get your new incoming messages, but harder to fetch your drafts, sent messages, and messages filed into folders.

My personal solution is to use an email service (Fastmail in my case) which I trust to maintain a reliable service. Fastmail is performing the backups continually for me rather than my needing to trust another party.

Bill

[InquiringMind]

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.

[n5bb]

A search indicates that this topic was discussed four years ago. I believe that the suggestions presented are still valid:
https://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=71755

I find Thunderbird to be a good email client which can easily retrieve messages from all subscribed IMAP folders. You could then periodically copy the Thunderbird data to an external destination. See:

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...a-new-computer
• https://www.mailconvertertools.com/b...nderbird-data/

Bill

[InquiringMind]

Thank you for the info.

Mailstore looks interesting. The price is certainly reasonable .

I still hope that someone knows of a service, though.

The Thunderbird local save looks similar to one for Outlook.

[TenFour]

What's wrong with just syncing using IMAP to another online cloud account, like Outlook.com? I have also used Thunderbird to do this, and it works reliably. With Gmail you can use Takeout to download all your emails on a schedule and have them automatically sent to Dropbox or OneDrive, or you can just download when they send you an email.

[Berenburger]

Pobox (part of Fastmail) has a sort of backup function. Mailstore Archive keeps an archive of the mail, separate from the inbox. All messages sent to Mailstore get CCed to the Archive.

[InquiringMind]

Originally Posted by TenFour

What's wrong with just syncing using IMAP to another online cloud account, like Outlook.com?

I have also used Thunderbird to do this, and it works reliably.

With Gmail you can use Takeout to download all your emails on a schedule and have them automatically sent to Dropbox or OneDrive, or you can just download when they send you an email.

Thanks for the reply.

I am not as fluent in Email as many of the folks here.

I think you are suggesting that I create an Outlook.com account and using some Sync feature it has that is more comprehensive than Fastmail's Import and Fetch utilities.

Or use Thunderbird mail client to somehow sync the Inbox.com and Fastmail.com accounts.

Or create a Gmail.com account and use a utility called Takeout to download emails to Dropbox or OneDrive either en mass or when received.

Am I understanding this correctly ???

[InquiringMind]

Originally Posted by Berenburger

Pobox (part of Fastmail) has a sort of backup function. Mailstore Archive keeps an archive of the mail, separate from the inbox. All messages sent to Mailstore get CCed to the Archive.

Thanks for the reply.

I am not as fluent in Email as many of the folks here.

I think you are suggesting that I use POBox.com instead of Fastmail.com to import the emails over from Inbox.com and use the utility in POBox.com called Mailstore to backup the emails once they are there.

Am I understanding this correctly ???

[Berenburger]

Originally Posted by InquiringMind

Am I understanding this correctly ???

Yes, you need an account for that. I just gave an alternative, not exactly the right answer to your question.

[InquiringMind]

I have been doing some experiments, and I thought some other folks might find the results interesting.

I downloaded and installed Mailstore Home 13, and I also tried Thunderbird and Outlook 2016.

I could not get Mailstore to retrieve all of my email folders. I also had this problem with Thunderbird. With Outlook 2016 I was able to uncheck a box that said Only Show Subscribed Folders in Hierarchy, and then was able to show all of them.

Once they were all visible, I was able to create a personal folder on my hard disk and copy each email folder to my hard disk.

There is probably a way to do this in Thunderbird, but I was not able to find the setting to show the rest of my email folders.

I could not find any such setting in Mailstore Home 13 and also I found that it is very difficult to change the folder where you store your archive. I ended up moving the folder in Windows, then when I restarted Mailstore, it gave an error and allowed me to recreate the folder.The program does work fast, but I only was able to figure out that I was missing folders when I tried to do a search. Also, I needed to download a plug-in from Adobe for PDF searches.

So at this point, I am using Outlook 2016.

Hope this helps the next person.

[n5bb]

The following describes how to use the latest version of Thunderbird (68.12.0) to view and synchronize with all folders in an IMAP account. I don't believe that these instructions have changed over a couple of years, but very old versions of Thunderbird might be different.

• Collapse then open the IMAP email account name in the tree at the left using the small arrows. Collapsing then opening the folder tree will cause a refresh of the folders known to Thunderbird. So, for example, I can create a new folder using webmail on my Fastmail account, and the new folder will become visible in Thunderbird after I collapse and then reopen the folder tree.
• Select (click once) the IMAP email account name in the tree at the left. This is the parent of Inbox and your other folders.
• In the choices you are presented, choose Manage folder subscriptions.
  • Click Refresh. This will pull an updated list of folders and their subscription status from the IMAP server.
  • Be sure that all folders are checked (subscribed).
  • Click OK.
• In the choices you are presented, choose Offline settings.
  • For the IMAP account you are working on, choose Synchronization & Storage in the tree at the left.
  • In Message Synchronizing, be sure that the checkbox (Keep messages in all folders for this account on this computer) is selected.
    • Then click the Advanced button. All folders other than Junk Mail and Trash should by default be selected for download. Make any desired changes and click OK.
  • In Disk Space you can choose to synchronize all messages or only recent messages. You can also choose to not download large messages. Then you can choose whether to delete older messages.
  • Click OK when finished with your Synchronization & Storage changes.
• Right-click the IMAP email account name in the tree at the left and choose Get Messages.
  • If you have many previously unsynchronized messages, it many take several minutes (or longer) to download all messages to Thunderbird.
  • You may need to click on a different folder to update the displayed list of messages.

Bill

[InquiringMind]

Dear n5bb,

Thank you for the instructions.
I am using the latest 64 bit version so there are a few differences.

Manage folder subscriptions is now "Subscribe" on the File menu.
Offline settings is now "File -> Offline -> Offline settings"

The rest appears to be the same.

Much appreciated.

InquiringMind