How do you ensure that you always have access to all your emails -
even at places where there is no Internet or when you aren’t carrying
your own laptop?
One of the popular options is that you use a tool like Microsoft Outlook
to download all your emails to the computer beforehand and you can then
read them anywhere even in offline mode. Both Gmail and Hotmail offer
POP3 access to help you download messages using any email client while
there are easy workarounds for Yahoo Mail.
There are some downsides though. First, most email clients aren’t
portable (can you carry emails on a USB drive?) and second, if all you
want is offline access to your Gmail messages and nothing extra, Outlook
is probably too heavy a tool for that purpose.
I have been testing a Windows-only utility called MailStore
that seems like an ideal solution for such a problem – the tool is
free, there’s a portable version for your USB stick and best of all, it
works out of the box with your email account without requiring any
configuration.
Step by Step – How to Backup your Emails
The way MailStore works is something like this. You install (or
unzip) the software to a folder and then select the email accounts that
you want to archive. They can be your Gmail accounts, Microsoft
Exchange, your old Outlook PST files, Thunderbird and any other web
email service that supports either IMAP or POP3.
The tool will pull your email messages from all these places into a
central location. If you have a large mailbox, you may specify criteria
to skip emails that are older than ‘n’ days. It skips the Spam and Junk
folders by default but you may also manually specify any folders /labels
that you wish to include (or exclude) from the backup.
That’s it. There’s a convenient search box allowing you to search all
your email accounts from one place. You can copy the MailStore folder
to your USB drive, or even your Dropbox folder, and access all the
emails from anywhere, anytime. Since this is more of an email backup
utility and not a full-blown email client, it cannot be used for
replying or sending new emails.
To quickly recap, here are some scenarios where you may find Mail Store useful:
1. You want to backup all your web mails to a safe location.
2. You want to carry your Microsoft Exchange / Outlook emails on a USB drive.
3. You have multiple email accounts and need to search all your mailboxes from one place.
4. You want offline access to all your web-based email accounts.
2. You want to carry your Microsoft Exchange / Outlook emails on a USB drive.
3. You have multiple email accounts and need to search all your mailboxes from one place.
4. You want offline access to all your web-based email accounts.