Best Free Email Backup Utility [1]

Introduction

For many people, email backup is nearly as—or more—important than backing up documents. Yet it's often not as easy. And if you have more than one account, backup can quickly get out of hand, particularly if you need to find some particular message(s).

Rated Products

[4]

MailStore Home [4] [5]

Backup all your email messages from multiple applications and online accounts into one secure and persistent archive.

Our Rating:

Gizmo's Freeware editor award for the best product in its class!

License: Free (Private/Educational use)

Backup all your email messages from multiple applications and accounts. Lightning-fast search, one-click backup, powerful export. Backup both POP3 and IMAP (including webmail services such as Gmail and Yahoo! Mail). MailStore Home is as easy-to-use as as it is powerful.

Requires Microsoft .Net, although that is included in Windows 7 and newer version.

Read full review... [5]

[9]

KLS Mail Backup [9] [10]

Backs up email for many popular email clients except for POP or IMAP accounts.

Our Rating:

License: Free (Private/Educational use)

Backs up email for many of the popular email clients. It's a clean, straightforward backup tool. Uses standard ZIP files to archive email, so you have direct access to the backups.

Does not backup POP or IMAP accounts. That means you cannot use it to backup webmail accounts like Gmail or Hotmail directly.

Read full review... [10]

Related Products and Links

Dropmyemail.com [12] offers cloud-based backup for most email services. It is a new service, just getting started - March 1, 2012. It has a well developed website and cloud interface, and is easy to set up for your account. The free account offers only 120 MB of storage, but you can expand that by getting your friends to sign up too (5 GB is $9.99 per year).
Thunderbird [13] can be used to back up any accounts that offer POP or IMAP access. Just add the accounts you want to back up, and then run Thunderbird when you want to create/update a backup. Of course Thunderbird saves server settings, but contacts are not included. You need to import them directly to Thunderbird from each of your email clients or accounts, or back them up separately. [more [14]]
Comodo Backup [15] is a general purpose backup utility, which also backs up email. It also offers 5 GB of online storage. Comodo works by backing up email that has already been downloaded by clients. It supports Thunderbird, Eudora, Microsoft Outlook 2003, Microsoft Outlook 2007, Windows Live Mail and Outlook Express. You can back up server settings, but evidently not contacts. It also backs up any files you select.
MailBrowserBackup [16] is a simple standalone (no install) program that detects and offers to back up Internet Explorer (Favorities ONLY), Mozilla Firefox (profile), Flock, Windows Mail, Windows Contacts (Win 7), Windows Live Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Opera (browser & mail), Apple Safari, Google Chrome, SRWare Iron, FileZilla FTP Client and Windows Live Messenger Plus.

In Windows 7 I found that you must be running as an Administrator in your own account or MailBrowserBackup will not back up Windows Contacts for your own account. You can open the backup archives with 7-Zip (and maybe other programs) and see exactly what's in them. Of course you could also extract them with 7-Zip.
Microsoft has a free backup program for Outlook [17] that creates backup copies of your .PST files at regular intervals. For Outlook 2002 and later versions.
Yet more backup programs
- Gmail Backup [18] via IMAP
- MozBackup [19]: for Thunderbird
- Best Free Outlook Express Backup [20]

Editor

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