Over time, it's important to backup and archive email messages. Large inboxes comprising of thousands of emails and attachments can become very tedious to work with. Tasks like searching for messages or contacts can become difficult. Also lots of emails will use-up considerable bandwidth and disk space, which can otherwise be used for other purposes. How often you decide to backup and archive emails is a personal choice. Some individuals or businesses archive emails very frequently (like weekly or monthly) whereas others may backup and archive emails quarterly or annually.
Backing up and archiving emails is also useful if you need to transfer emails onto another computer, and is often much quicker than manually syncing email accounts on another machine or device.
Typically all archiving and backups can be done on your own computer, from your normal email software. However the exact instructions to follow for backing up and achieving emails vary significantly, based on what software or version you are using.
Mail Client
Most email clients have the ability to create backups of an email account. A few that we recommend are:
- Mac Mail
- ImportExport Tools (Thunderbird)
- Horcrux (macOS app)
Chillimail
Chillimail includes automatic backups of all emails. For speed of restoration and searching messages, it is still good practice to maintain your own local backups.
