Backup Your Gmail Emails To YOUR Hard Drive

Do you use Gmail? Of course you do – doesn’t everybody?

The Google gives you tons of space to store your precious email and attachments. We have found ways to use that space for our evil practical ways.

We all know The Google backs up regularly and runs some of the biggest redundant data centers in the world, but do you really trust your emails from your long lost girlfriend attachments of your trip to that sci fi convention important work emails and attachments with them?

Wouldn’t you feel safer with a backup of your own?

Of course you would young Admin! It is one of the rules I preach daily as a Network Administrator.

BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP! He who laughs last usually has a backup…

Enough beating around the bush – the tool is called simply GMail Backup and guess what it can do?

Wow you guys are on the ball today! Yup it can backup your entire Gmail account including attachments to a local folder on your computer. That is backup entire Gmail account on your hard drive. Ready to check it out? The GUI version of this is WINDOWS ONLY but there is also a command line version that works on Linux and Mac.

The installer version 0.44 is 4.4 MB and can be downloaded from here (Windows, Linux or Mac). The Windows download is directly available here. After installing it you can launch it from your start menu.

This is as simple as it gets guys. Easy as….well easy as typing in your username and password and clicking a few buttons.

You will have a full local copy (or a backup filtered by date). These messages are able to be opened in Outlook Express or similar email programs – and get this they will retain all their attachments! This is a glimpse of the file structure Gmail Backup creates. As you can see in the screen shot below it used the path I specified in the GUI and if I had folders created in my account it would have created those sub folders as well.

It gets even better. You can restore your local emails right back to Gmail with the click of the restore button. Awesome!

Is anyone using another method to do this? (Yes this is done via IMAP but it does not require any technical knowledge other than clicking and installing.) Let us know in the comments!

Let’s hear how MakeUseOf’s superstars are backing up their Gmail accounts….or if you think we need to.

Get Gmail Messages Delivered on Multiple Computers

Get Gmail Messages Delivered on Multiple Computers via POP

Do you access Gmail messages on two or more computers via POP clients like Outlook or Thunderbird. The problem (or advantage) with POP access is that once an email message gets downloaded onto one computer, it is skipped by other email clients.

To explain that further – let’s say you have configured both your personal laptop and work computer to download emails from your Gmail account via POP access. Now if the emails are downloaded to the laptop first, they wont be available on your work computer (and vice-versa).

While this is a time-saving feature, your emails are split across different computers. To trick your POP client into downloading Gmail emails that are already fetched by other clients, just use the recent mode in Gmail.

Open your Outlook (or other POP client) and add the word “recent:” to your gmail username. That means if your gmail address is “john@gmail.com” replace that with “recent:john@gmail.com”

This trick will also work on custom domains if you are using Google Apps with Gmail.

Other lesser known Gmail tricks – Mute Email, Dot Blindness.

For details, refer to Google Apps Support and Gmail Support.