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Incrementally Backup Gmail or Any IMAP Email Account

Last week nearly 150,000 Gmail users logged into their account to find all their data – email, attachment, chat and contacts – gone, totally wiped clean. Google later identified the issue as a software bug in a recently released storage software update. Thankfully, Google keeps multiple copies of their user’s email account from which Google is currently in the process of restoring the data for affected users.

One thing that you can do to prevent something like this from happening to your account is keep a backup. Believe me, backing up an email account is one of the easiest thing to do. All you have to do is setup an email program on your computer and download all mails to it. The other option you have is to use a software specifically created for such purpose. IMAPSize is a great one.

imapsize

IMAPSize is a freeware Windows application that allows you to quickly and efficiently manage your IMAP mail accounts. IMAPSize is not an email client. The main purpose of IMAPSize is to locate space consuming folders, break them according to size and allow you to manage them, hence putting your storage quota under control.

What makes IMAPSize an excellent tool for mail backup is that it allows incremental backup for selected email labels or the entire account. With IMAPSize you can download messages, save attachments locally, set or remove flags, or move mails from one account to another. All that is required is your email service provider to support the IMAP protocol. Gmail does.

For Gmail use these settings:

  • Server: imap.gmail.com
  • Port: 993
  • Use Secure Connection (SSL): Yes

Features

  • Display of all mailboxes in an account with visual alerts for the most space consuming mailboxes
  • Convenient storage quota display
  • Powerful search capabilities on single or multiple mailboxes
  • Delete attachments (all or individual) without downloading them
  • Save attachments locally from multiple messages (BETA)
  • Mailbox management (expunge, create, delete, rename)
  • Message management (change flags, copy, move, delete, etc)
  • Manage folder subscriptions
  • Modify message headers
  • Copy messages from one IMAP account to another
  • Perform incremental backups of multiple folders in your IMAP account
  • Perform incremental backups of the whole account
  • Replicate IMAP folder hierarchy to your local drive
  • Download/upload messages to/from mbox and eml files
  • eml2mbox conversion
  • mbox2eml conversion. This can be extremely useful in the process of moving messages from Thunderbird to Outlook.
  • Spam handles which provide a basis for visual alerts on spam messages
  • SSL connections
  • Minimizes bandwidth consumption wherever possible
  • Keyboard friendly - you can perform almost all operations without using the mouse

Related:
Gmail Backup - the easiest way to backup and restore Gmail accounts
Backup your online accounts with Backupify

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Comments

  1. DushyantMarch 8, 2011 at 3:41 PM

    Hello,
    I am one of the developer team member, and would like to share a simple tool that lets you enable to have gmail backup or IMAP backup. The tool is known as Beyond Inbox.

    Since we all have been very well acquainted with the gmail outage or disruption and such problem might be occurred in the future also. So what we have to do is to have regular backup of our email account.
    So the simplest way to start the backup using Beyond Inbox.
    It generate separate file(.eml) for each email message.
    http://www.beyondinbox.com/documentation/mail-backup--how-to-backup-emails-from-imap-account.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownMarch 17, 2011 at 7:37 AM

    Hi, can I not download my gmail in windows mail? Smeone please reply.

    ReplyDelete

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