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Back up cloud email locally as losing account access can cost you all your mail.
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Use Thunderbird (IMAP + add-ons) to download your email data and store it in a searchable local mailbox.
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Regularly back up the downloaded emails using NAS storage or a backup tool, and prune your online mailbox for privacy.
Pretty much everyone relies on a cloud email provider like Gmail, iCloud, or Outlook.com, but few consider what happens if you lose access to it due to a stolen account or forgotten password. Here's how to make sure you have your own copy of all your important emails.
Why You Need to Back Up Your Emails
Your online email account used to be just a temporary home for your emails, allowing them to be received while your PC or laptop was offline, and then downloaded by an email client app when you dialed up. Then Gmail gave you practically unlimited online email storage and everyone started keeping their mail entirely online. This is justified because it is super convenient to access them using a web browser, especially when you have multiple devices.
This presents a problem, however: if you lose access to your online account (for most, that's your Microsoft or Google account), you lose access to all of your emails, and there's a lot of important stuff in there. Without your own copy of that data that you fully control, it's at risk of being lost.
This applies to enterprise and paid email solutions like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 too. These services operate under a shared responsibility model, where the cloud platform is responsible for keeping things up and running, and you're responsible for making sure your data is safe and making sure it's backed up.
Your Privacy Is at Stake, Too
If you have your own copy of your mail stored on your device, you can also slim down your online mailbox and remove old emails. This has privacy advantages: if a scammer got access to years worth of email, they could learn a lot about you. The information could be used to impersonate you to further other scams against those you know, extort you, or for good old-fashioned identity theft. If it's stored locally, it's harder for them to reach.
Backing up Your Emails Is Surprisingly Difficult
Cloud email providers are making it increasingly difficult to get your data out. In addition to owning your own domain name , making sure you also keep your own copy of all of your data stored on your own devices makes sure you're never at the mercy of cloud providers who may deny you access to your data for a terms of use violation, or just because you forgot your password.
For example, recent versions of Outlook don't let you create local mailbox files to simply copy emails from the server to your PC, and now won't even sync more than 60 days worth of mail locally. While legacy Outlook still lets you do this, it's not cross-platform. Necessary improvements to security also make it difficult to use other mail clients as many don't support modern multi-factor authentication necessary to connect to email services.
The importance of email backup is well recognized: there are many enterprise solutions for backing up cloud data, but they're often pricey and difficult to set up. Unfortunately, there's no practical turnkey solution for home and small business users, and while some providers will let you download an archive of your data, I also wanted something that was readily searchable and browseable.
How to Back Up Gmail, Outlook.com, and Other Email Providers Locally
That doesn't mean it's impossible (or difficult). Thunderbird is a 100% free and open-source email client for Windows, macOS, and Linux that's been around for pretty much forever. It's not the prettiest and doesn't have the bells and whistles of other clients, but it's a solid solution that is able to download emails from Gmail, Outlook.com, and other popular email providers, with support for modern multi-factor authentication.
It also lets you create a local mailbox stored on your device's hard drive, and you can copy or move data from online into it with the help of plugins.
To do this, download Thunderbird from its official site and install it. When you run it for the first time, you'll be prompted to set up your email account. In most cases, it'll automatically figure out all the settings for you. Make sure you select an IMAP account, as this type of account will sync your local mail with your mail online, so changes made on your PC are reflected online, and vice versa.
To make sure all mail is downloaded by Thunderbird, right-click on the newly created account and select Settings, and then open the Synchronization and Storage tab. Make sure the "Keep messages in all folders for this account on this computer", "Synchronize all messages locally regardless of age", and "Don't delete any messages" options are enabled.
The next step is dependent on your email host. If all of your folders aren't showing in Thunderbird, right-click on your Inbox and select Subscribe, then make sure all the boxes are checked. My email provider makes it necessary to manually subscribe to each folder in my mailbox, and won't let me do more than a few at a time. This was tedious, but it only needs to be done once, or when a new folder is created, and was a good excuse to tidy up and organize my emails.Once that's done, you need to wait for your mail to download. Make a cup of tea if you've got a big inbox.
Now you need a local folder to store your offline mail. Right-click on Local Folders in the sidebar and click New Folder.
You can also move where your local folders are stored, for example to a NAS or location that's easier to back up, by changing the Local Storage path in the Account Options for the Local folders account (note, changing this path won't move files from the previous path).
Now you can then copy your messages to your local folder. Unfortunately, Thunderbird's built-in functionality for this isn't exactly robust, and doesn't handle subfolders.
Plugins to the rescue! This Copy Email Folder Thunderbird Add-On does it all in a couple of clicks, and handles subfolders well. Once it's installed, it's added to the context menu when you right-click on a folder in your inbox.
When it's done, you get a nice summary to confirm.
This isn't a perfect solution, but it's doing the job for me. It's not automated, but it's not a big deal to set a calendar reminder and spend a couple of minutes each month to slim down and backup my online mailbox. And, of course, it's your responsibility to make sure that Thunderbird has properly copied your messages before removing the online copy, as bugs and sync errors do happen on occasion. Part of a good backup strategy is testing your backups to confirm everything is there, and that it can be read.
The Importance of an Open Web
The challenges of getting your mail out of online platforms highlight the importance of open tools and protocols—it's your data, and you should be able to control it, including where it is and what's done with it. It's not unrealistic to think that eventually, as demand for local email sync continues to diminish, the open standards that allow you to back up your email, cloud platforms will remove this functionality under the pretext that nobody uses it. Of course, you can also host your own email server, but it's impractical to the point where even big businesses with big pockets and entire IT teams prefer to outsource the job.
Once your email is copied or moved to your computer, you'll need to make sure it's backed up . Check out our guide to using Duplicati to back up files from Windows, macOS, and Linux, and our guide to NAS storage , a great place to keep your files safe.
