How to Backup Email

Backup email using your existing email client

A simpler method of email backup, is to use your existing email client to archive your emails into a seperate folder on your computer. The steps below apply to Microsoft Outlook only. If you use a different email account, search Google for help on how to archive email using your email client.

Note: When your emails are archived to a local folder on your computer, these same emails will be removed from our remote email server – This method is useful if your email account is running out of space on our email server.  

To manually archive Outlook items, do the following:

  1. Click the File tab
  2. Click Cleanup Tools.
  3. Click Archive.
  4. Click the Archive this folder and all subfolders option, and then click the folder that you want to archive. Any subfolder of the folder you select is included in this manual archive.
  5. Under Archive items older than, enter a date.Archive dialog box
  6. If you do not want to use the default file or location, under Archive file, click Browse to specify a new file or location. Browse to find the file that you want, or enter the file name, then click OK. The destination file location appears in the Archive file box.
  7. Select the Include items with “Do not AutoArchive” checked check box to include any items that might be individually marked to be excluded from automatic archiving. This option does not remove that exclusion from these items, but instead ignores the Do not AutoArchive check box for this archive only.

Backup email using Horde – Note: This can timeout if there are too many emails.

First login to your email using web mail. See this guide for help: https://websitewebdesigns.co.za/webmail-login

Once you have logged in, right click the folder that you would like to backup (e.g. Inbox), then click “Export”. Your email folder will be downloaded in MBOX format.

If you would like to view your backup, download a free email client thunderbird: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

Once thunderbird is installed, you can open your email backup and view your emails.

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