I’ve always preferred to access email through my ISP’s webmail service, rather than through an email client like Outlook Express or Thunderbird. The main reason for this preference is convenience, in that I can access my email from any computer that has Internet access.
I also like to keep my messages organized, so over time I’ve created several webmail folders and distributed messages amongst them.
Now the time has come where I would like to backup my webmail to my local computer.
Although I trust that my email data is safer from hardware failure residing in my ISP’s data center, there’s always a chance that data corruption could occur or that my account could be accidentally deleted.
After some research, I discovered that there’s no easy solution to synchronizing webmail folders to your computer. The best solution I found is slightly tedious.
Although other service providers’ policies may vary, my particular ISP’s POP3 service will only download messages from the inbox folder. So what I had to do was move the contents of each folder into the inbox, download them, and move them back into their original folder.
*** The specific example below shows how to use Outlook Express in WinXP to backup your webmail messages. Other POP3 clients are capable of doing the same, but their options/menus will be different.
For example, let’s say I have a webmail folder called “Friends” containing hundreds of messages. I would first make sure that my webmail inbox is clear, then I would move all the messages from the Friends folder into the inbox. Now, I would configure Outlook Express (or any other POP3 client) to download those messages – making sure that “leave a copy of messages on the server” was checked off in the settings. After the messages had been downloaded, I would go back to webmail and move the messages from the inbox back into the friends folder.
You would repeat this process for every folder in your webmail account until you have a local copy of all messages.
Outlook Express Mail Account Settings. Select "Leave a copy of messages on server" to prevent Outlook Express from deleting your messages from webmail after they have been downloaded to your computer
It’s not a pretty or graceful solution, but the effort is worth it to have a safe, local backup.
You may want to store the messages on an external storage device, rather than your internal hard drive. To do this, you would change the Store Folder. To reach the dialog shown below, click Tools -> Options in Outlook Express.
Modify the Store Folder to keep email contents on an external device
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One Response to “Backup Webmail Folders using POP3”
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July 6th, 2010 at 1:18 pm
I appreciate your good tips and advice on this website. I used alot of them on my daily work. Thank you.
best regards,
Dexterm Systems Inc.,