Whether you want to keep all your incoming and outgoing email messages for purely business reasons or out of nostalgia, leaving them all in your active mailboxes isn't practical. Fortunately, there are solutions to backup or archive your messages, MailStore Home being one of the most flexible.
A few hundred messages in your Inbox or Outbox is still manageable, but when the number of messages runs into the thousands, it quickly becomes cluttered. You better look forward to a smooth backup or archiving strategy.
Of course we cannot cover all known e-mail services and clients, so we have made a balanced selection: MS Outlook and Gmail. Let's take a look at some basic backup tools and built-in archiving capabilities first. Then it's the turn of the powerful backup and archiving tool MailStore Home, which can handle a variety of email clients and services.
01 Outlook Backups
Although you can manually back up Outlook email messages – you can even do that simply by dragging an email selection to a disk folder so that they end up in an .msg file – but that is quite laborious. Fortunately, there is a tool that automates the entire backup process: Safe PST Backup. The paid version costs € 29.96, but with the free version you also come a long way. The main limitation of the latter is that you can only backup one Outlook profile.
Download and install the tool. At the first startup, the program asks to indicate a backup folder, after which you click the Start Backup may press. The pst files associated with your Outlook profile will now be backed up. In addition to emails, such a backup also contains contacts and calendars.
By default, a backup is made every hour. Through Options / Schedule can you adjust this frequency or choose Manually.
If your original pst file ever gets corrupted, simply replace it with the backed up one. You can find the correct location in Outlook via File / Account Settings (2x) / Data files.
02 Gmail Backups
You can secure your Gmail messages in several ways. For example, you can set the service to immediately forward all incoming messages to a mailbox of another mail service. Or you use an IFTTT recipe to send messages or attachments to a cloud storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive (for example, so). With the free version of Spinbackup, you can secure a total of up to 4 GB of email messages, with a daily backup frequency and with strong AES encryption.
A handy alternative is UpSafe. Install the tool and launch it. click on Sign in with Google, sign in with your Google account and press allow. Up for you Start backup press, open first Backup options. Here you determine which emails you want to include in the backup. You do this on the basis of criteria such as Sent Date, From contains and (via a selection from) leaflets. Similar options are available on the tab Archiving, but in this case, the backed up messages will be deleted from your Gmail account. On the tab Storage choose a suitable storage location on your PC. After a free registration comes the option Create a schedule available: a kind of shortcut to the Windows Task Scheduler that allows you to specify exactly when and how often you want such a backup.
Incidentally, UpSafe provides a similar tool for MS Outlook.
03 Outlook Archiving
Outlook 365/2016 itself provides a fairly rudimentary archiving function via the mail folder Archive. Basically you don't have to do more than select the relevant emails in (for example) your Inbox, pressing the Backspace key and the tab Start the button To archive to press. Or you simply drag your selection to the archive folder. Through File / Utilities / Set Archive Folder you can set a different folder for this.
To automate the archiving process a bit, go to File / Options / Advanced. Press the button here AutoArchive Settings and make the desired settings. This is how you determine the frequency (default Every 14 days) and the location of the archive folder (a pst file) at Move old items to. Press on the button Apply these settings to all folders and confirm with OK. Or you can be more selective: right-click on a mail folder, choose Characteristics and open the tab Auto archive. Select the option Archive items in this folder with the default settings or Archive this folder with the following settings if you want to deviate from your standard rules.
04 Gmail Archiving
When you place a check in Gmail next to mails in your inbox and then click at the top To archive click, the mail selection disappears from your inbox. You can find it in the folder All email (if necessary, click here first More). If you want to restore the messages to your Inbox, select them again and click at the top Move to inbox.
Incidentally, you can also automate such archiving by creating a filter. Go to Institutions and choose Filters and blocked addresses / Create new filter. Fill in the desired criteria, click on Create filter and tick Skip Inbox (Archive) at. Confirm with Create filter.
05 MailStore Home
One of the most flexible solutions for both backup and archiving purposes for a variety of email programs is the free MailStore Home. Run the exe file and install the tool (via Install on this computer) or choose the portable version (via Install portable version on drive X). The latter can be useful, for example, if you regularly want to compile your e-mail archive from mailboxes from different PCs. Or when you want to export (read: migrate) an imported mailbox to a mail client on another device.
After a while you can get started. In the left pane, click Personal archive, then it turns out to be empty. Logical, because you have to first Archive emails and you do that with the option of the same name in that same window.
