Dave’s Lab

Backing Up Any Email Account with Gmail

May 10 2008

So I was listening to Buzz Out Loud yesterday and it was mentioned that one of the listeners received his email from his Internet Service Provider (ISP), but was incredibly disappointed when his ISP’s email servers failed and they did not have a backup! Of course, this meant that he had lost his email with no recourse to get it back. This got me thinking as to how one could backup his/her email to another service in case of a massive fail by an ISP. As I started to do some research around this, I realized that the easiest resource was staring me in the face as I checked my own email: Gmail!

So, here’s how to do it:

1) Setup a Gmail account if you don’t already have one at mail.google.com. You won’t need a fast computer or modern browser to access it, though since there are so many great free browsers, you can always get my favorite here, or another great one here, or finally a somewhat decent one here. Realize though, that your default web browser such as Internet Explorer or Safari will work just fine.

2) After undergoing the Setup process, go to your “Settings” by clicking on the link on the top right corner of your screen:

(please note – the screenshots below aren’t going to look exactly like what you’ll see, since I’ve edited out pieces of the shot that give any identifying personal information)

3) Next, go to the “Accounts” section of the Settings page:

4) Scroll down to the bottom of the page to the “Get mail from other accounts:” section and click on the “Add another mail account” link.

5) To give you an idea of what is happening, Gmail has this feature to allow you to use their services similarly to how you use your email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail). Your computer’s email client probably accesses your email via a technology called “POP”, which stands for Post Office Protocol. Every time you open up your email, your computer uses this technology to go the server where the email is stored and received, and gets a copy for you to view. The most commonly used way is POP, although there is another technology called IMAP.

In this instance, Gmail is acting as your computer and downloading copies of your email to its server and making them viewable (and searchable!) via their website’s interface. The process of setting up Gmail to do this will be very similar to the way you set up your desktop email client to access your email server in the first place.

6) Now, a dialog box will pop up, so make sure that you allow this pop up window or temporarily turn off your pop up blocker before proceeding. Enter in the email address of the account you will be using. I will be using an email account I setup for this example at my domain called “askdave@daves-lab.com”. Click “Next Step”.

7) The following dialog box will appear. Enter in the information necessary to access the server. You can usually find this information in the original setup packet that came with your ISP’s connection service. If you can’t see it, try going into your current email client and looking in the “Account Settings” or similarly titled options pane, and find out what settings it uses to get your email already. Please, take care, however, to make sure that you check the “Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server” box because otherwise Gmail will not leave copies of the messages for your desktop client to receive.

* Note: I strongly recommend that you always use Secure Socket Layer (aka SSL) connections to get your email either online or in your email client. It’s a more secure way to get your emails. As you can see below, I’ve selected the option to use SSL when retrieving my mail. However, in order to do this, you’ll have to change the “Port” number to 995. In case you can’t use SSL, just leave it at the default number of 110.

Finally, click “Add Account” and finalize through the changes. Google will then send an email to your original email account, which should be received by Google. That will have a confirmation link/code for you to enter, after which you will be all set up!

9) You should finally see your account listed in the “Accounts” pane of Gmail’s Settings. To back up your email, check into your Gmail account fairly often (once a week, or even once a day if necessary), go into “Settings” and then “Accounts” as you did before, and then scroll down to your account listing and click “Check mail now”. Again, please note: you will need to do this one a regular basis to absolutely ensure that your email is being backed up.

Overall, this is really just the tip of the iceberg. Gmail offers you a ton of great features, including being able to send emails from the POP email account you just set up. In effect, you could manage your external email entirely from Gmail! I, in fact, use this feature to a certain extent and find it very useful.

In fairness, I suppose I should mention that if your email client is set up to keep hard copies of your email on your local machine, such that you can access them even offline, then you probably won’t need this service. However, that begs the question of what happens to your email when your hard drive fails? To cover both bases (ISP server failing and/or your computer failing), I think this is the best option. It also gives you a totally different backup email account just in case.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me, not surprisingly, at askdave@daves-lab.com. As for you geeks in the audience, what are your thoughts? Are they any easier services for this same purpose? Thoughts in the comments.