Backing It Up - Email
This is the second article in my series about backing up your system using web-based services. In my previous article, I discussed the use of Flickr as a photo archival/sharing service — this time my focus is going to be on email.
If you’re using a desktop email client like Outlook or Thunderbird you’ve likely got some pretty large email archives sitting on your hard drive somewhere. For the most part, your email archives are just like any other file on your system that you might want to back up — and the same tools/services you would use to do offsite backup of your other files would be equally applicable to your email archives. However, there are some backup strategies which are unique to email that you may want to consider — and that’s precisely what want to discuss here (Note, that I still have a post on general-purpose, off-site backup solutions in the works, but I want to get through some of these application-specific solutions first).
Web-based Email
For most people, I suspect that email back-up is a non-issue. Those of you out there who rely on web-based services like Gmail, HotMail or Yahoo! Mail as your primary e-mail interface certainly don’t need to worry about offsite-backup since your mail is never “onsite” to begin with. Of course, if you’re concerned about a catastrophic event at Google/Microsoft/Yahoo you may want to create a local back-up of your mail, but we’ll save that topic for another post.
So, if most people’s e-mail lives in the cloud to begin with, why are we even talking about email backup? Well, I suspect that there are still a fair number of people (such as myself) that are pretty attached to their desktop mail clients. I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook for my Exchange-based email at work for years now and have grown so accustomed to it that it is my preferred client for my personal email as well. Similarly, my wife prefers to use a desktop mail client over the web-based services and is using Thunderbird on her Mac.
IMAP
So, if you’re using a desktop email client, there’s a good chance that you’re using the POP protocol to download your mail — this is the standard for retrieving email and will be supported by any service that allows remote retrieval. However, there is another, less common protocol called IMAP that is supported by some services.
If it’s offered by your email provider, you should give IMAP a try. With POP, the client typically downloads messages from the server to the local machine and then deletes the copy that is on the server (the POP protocol is pretty dumb, so if it didn’t delete the messages on the server it would end-up re-downloading them the next time that it went to check for messages). With IMAP, you can use your local mail client to browse/read/organize your messages but everything stays on the server. This gives you the best of both worlds: off-site storage but with access via your favorite desktop client.
Because IMAP leaves all your messages on the server, you have the ability to use desktop clients on multiple machines as well as your email provider’s web-based interface and still have access to all of your messages. This is a huge benefit for people that may need to have access to their email from more than one machine.
I should point out that, of the three big email providers, only Gmail offers IMAP access (the screenshot above shows where you go to enable IMAP support in the Gmail settings). In fact, Gmail is the only one of the three that offers POP access for free. Both Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail require that you upgrade to a paid account in order to get even POP access and neither offer IMAP at any level of service.
Server-side POP Archives
One of the downsides of IMAP is that performance can sometimes be a bit sluggish — especially for people who are used to downloading their messages via POP and working with them locally. Even if you decide not to use IMAP, Gmail will still allow you use a desktop client while keeping a server-side archive of your messages.
If you are using POP to download messages from your Gmail account there is an option in the settings that will cause Gmail to put a copy of every message that is downloaded in the “All Mail” folder (see screenshot to the left). Messages are still removed from the inbox (so you don’t have the issue of re-downloading the same messages) but you’re still left with a copy on the server.
Much like the IMAP solution, the server-side archive means that you can log into your Gmail account from any computer and still browse your messages — even after they’ve been downloaded by your mail client and removed from the inbox.
Obviously, any management of your email that you do with your desktop client (deleting messages, organizing messages into folders, etc) won’t be reflected back in the Gmail archives using this method. However, if you’re just looking for a simple way to ensure you’ve got an offsite archive of all your messages, this will do the trick.
Gmail: The Universal Inbox
It should be obvious by now that I’m a big fan of Gmail. As far as I’m concerned, the fact that they offer both POP and IMAP access with their free accounts puts them way ahead of any of the other email providers out there. Gmail also offers 6.5 gigabytes of free storage which is probably enough to hold a lifetime’s worth of email for most people (I’ve got 3 years worth of email in my Gmail account and am currently using 4% of my available space).
Even if you aren’t currently using Gmail as your email provider, Google makes it pretty easy to use Gmail as your universal inbox. In the Accounts tab of the settings you’ll find a “Get mail from other accounts” option which will allow Gmail to import messages from up to five additional email accounts (assuming they allow POP access). If your provider doesn’t support message retrieval via POP, you may be able to automatically forward messages to your Gmail account (See Using Gmail as your Universal Email Account [Google Tutor] for additional help).
Using this method you can maintain your existing email address while still taking advantage of Gmail features like IMAP or POP archiving.
For those of you that have your own domain name, you can still use Google to host your email even if your website is hosted elsewhere. By signing-up for a free Google Apps account and adding a few entries to your DNS record Google will manage your domain’s email while providing all of the features of a standard Gmail account. The screen shot below shows the MX records I added to the DNS entry for dehamer.com which allows my email to be handled by Google (if you sign up for a Google Apps account you’ll find that they have specific DNS configuration instructions for most of the major service providers).
I’ve used this approach to set-up dehamer.com email accounts for a number of family members. Some of them rely solely on the web-based, Gmail-like interface while others are using desktop clients.
In some ways, I guess this post is a bit of a love letter to Gmail, but I really do believe that it is the best service for managing your email. I wouldn’t consider any of the techniques listed above to be “back-up solutions” in the traditional sense, but if you’re simply looking for a brain-dead way to ensure that you never lose any of your email, Gmail has a lot to offer.
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