How to backup and restore mails from online services

Is it possible to backup all mails from a Gmail or Yahoo mail account to my computer and then again restore them?

I use Windows XP on my machine.

Ghost Answer

Posted 2012-10-04T12:04:34.220

Reputation: 288

http://www.techspot.com/guides/370-backup-gmail/ http://www.backup4all.com/kb/how-to-backup-yahoo-emails-244.html I'd suggest using Thunderbird, it serves as an off-line viewer as well. I'm not sure whether you can restore to an online service, though. But perhaps you might be able to save a back-up from Thunderbird such that you have your e-mail available in 3 places (online, offline, backup [on external disk, perhaps])... – Tamara Wijsman – 2012-10-04T12:26:28.063

@TomWijsman I'm fairly certain it's not as easy to restore mails to the services in question though – might be challenging setting up an IMAP account locally and importing the mails or similar, I don't know. – slhck – 2012-10-04T12:28:32.160

Thank for reopen this. I placed this question so because I want to know it is possible or not to take backup of mail and restore them on any mail account like gmail, yahoomail etc – Ghost Answer – 2012-10-04T12:28:48.557

@slhck: The only always-works option I could see is to replay all the mails by sending them through some SMTP server to yourself, in a way that ignores the "from" field. Might not work everywhere, in which case adding the "from" e-mail to the subject field instead might be a better solution. This would only result in a different e-mail header (things like originating IP etc would differ). – Tamara Wijsman – 2012-10-04T12:34:33.153

Answers

You can use MsgExtract to save your email messages from any IMAP source, like Gmail or Yahoo mail, to disk as single individual files (EML, MSG or PDF).

When needed you can use MsgExtract to restore your email messages back to Gmail or to another email client like Outlook or Thunderbird.

http://www.maildev.com/msgextract/

(Disclaimer, I am the author of MsgExtract)