I will shortly be losing access to my online e-mail address provider. Can anyone suggest a suitable reliable method of downloading all of the accumulated e-mails for safe offline storage that will allow me to back them up/save them in a searchable index in case I need to review/access the information contained at a later date?
Thanks
sure, install thunderbird
The mails are easily searchable by thunderbird, less easily by other means
Download all your mails into thunderbird using either IMAP or POP3, which ever you fancy, then backup the thunderbird email disk area as simple files.
I think I've got about 15G of email in thunderbird, and it's backed up offsite. The search facility is pretty good, though obviously dependent on disk speed.
I think one of the issues here is that for example on Virgin, there seems to be two stores, the pop3 one and the webmail one. When you download the pop3 one and delete them from the server, they seem to remain on the webmail for ever. So whay would be needed in this case would be a way to get every email from webmail. it couldbe that a program exists to do this or maybe via IMAP, if that uses the same list. Brian
Note that if you have folders setup in the mailbox you will have to use IMAP to download those.
I suspect the emails are still on the server because you have told your email client to leave them there.
In some or all clients you could set it up so email is downloaded using POP3 and deleted as soon as it is downloaded. But that's risky. For example, if your disk fails before you have backed it up you lose the recent emails. Leaving a copy on the server is also a way of using POP3 with more than one computer.
You might also opt to have email which is downloaded removed from the server after N days so as to allow time for backups.
Anyhow, if the emails are still on the server those in the inbox can be downloaded again simply by setting up the account afresh (e.g. on another computer). As John Rumm pointed out though this won't fetch any in other folders.
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