There are many reasons to want to back up your mailbox: to check your emails offline, to archive and keep old emails, to close an unused mailbox or simply to protect yourself from potential hacking.
The professional mail host PowerMail, 100% French, specialist in mail hosting for businesses and communities, offers a free tool that allows you to save a mailbox whatever your host.
If there are software solutions that allow you to save your mailbox or, depending on your host, integrated options to do so, this tool offered by PowerMail is the only one to my knowledge that is done online, free of charge, and that works with any host: Gmail, Orange, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.
I tested it in particular with my Byothe.fr mailbox working with the blog host and it works very well!
Save your mailbox
To get there, it's very simple.
You will need to provide several pieces of information relating to your mailbox:
- Your email
- your mailbox password
- the address of the IMAP server of your mailbox provider which you will find very easily in the settings of your mailbox or by making a google search.
Finally, you will be able to select the backup format of your mailbox depending on what you want to do with it later:
- HTML
- EML (Outlook compatible)
- MBOX (open format used by many email software)
- Maildir (used in particular by Qmail)
And finally, you will be able to encrypt your archive using the password of the mailbox in question.
You can then download it and save it to your computer.
Once you download your archive, your backup will be deleted from PowerMail's servers.
The tool works perfectly, is very easy to use and is very effective. Don't hesitate to use it to save your emails from time to time... it will save you from unpleasant surprises!
Although the tool is 100% free, you will still need to be a customer of PowerMail to be able to save more than 50 emails. But otherwise you can always do a little cleaning in your mailbox, it won't hurt!
Article updated on January 5, 2025 by Byothe
