If you are using a standard email client like Mozilla Thunderbird or Outlook Express to access your email the risk is that you forget to backup your email. If your computer crashes you may lose all emails stored on it and there is no guarantee that your email is kept with your hosting provider.
Gmail to the rescue
An easy and free backup solution for your POP or IMAP email account is to use Gmail. They allow a large amount of storage (> 7GB at the moment) and the backup is done on their bandwidth so if you pay per data transferred this is perfect.
Setup is quite straight forward.
- Create a GMail account at http://mail.google.com.
- Goto Setting – Accounts
- Under “Get mail from other accounts” click “Add a mail account you own”
- Enter the login credentials for your account
- Finished
Make sure to tick the checkbox “Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server.”
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