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If you’ve ever felt the need to backup all your e-mails so you have your own personal copy, you’ve come to the right place to know how to do it. If you’re saving work e-mails though, it is recommended to ask your IT department about doing this, so you can avoid legal consequences if it’s prohibited.
Steps
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Head to "Settings. " On your Gmail account, click on the gear icon at the top right -
Go to "Forwarding and POP/IMAP."Advertisement -
Enable POP for all mail. Then set “Keep Gmail’s copy in the inbox” on the drop-down menu in the next option. -
Download and install Thunderbird. It’s a free e-mail program that will help you back up your mail for free. -
Set up Thunderbird. When you first run Thunderbird, it will ask you to set things up. When you get to the login screen, where you type your e-mail address and password, click “Manual setup.” -
Change IMAP to POP3. This is located beside “Incoming.” -
Type in “pop.gmail.com” (without the quotes) on the “Incoming” text field. -
Change the "Port" field to 995. -
Hit "Done" and make sure everything is working. -
Hit the "Start" button to access your messages stored on your Thunderbird profile. -
Type in %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ in the search bar. -
Click the folder with “Default” that appears, and open it in a window.- You will then find your e-mails saved in the folder
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Open a folder where you want to store copies of your emails in your file explorer. -
Launch Outlook, then head to your Inbox. -
Select all the messages you want to save, and simply drag and drop them into the folder.- This will include attachments as well, but they can only be opened in Outlook as the format of the saved files is proprietary to the e-mail client.
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- Alternatively, you can use the Outlook method for any email address you have (Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.).Thanks
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