emails accounts

[Neville Bailey]

In fact, the Gmail limit is over 7GB!

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[wynn]

Peter Carruthers is running a number of mini seminars on various topics, one of which will be on gmail and how powerfull it is.
If you are not a member of 'Petes weekly' better join now, it's free.

http://petesweekly.com/

[irneb]

Just a bit more news on GMail: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02...eletion_snafu/
OK, so it's only 0.08% of GMail's users - i.e. about 150000 people have all their mail wiped out. Maybe Google will get it back for them, but this shows one of the possible problems using a cloud-based email service.

As stated before, I'm happy with my gmail account for personal mail. For my business stuff I prefer having a more localized version where I don't rely on some external party to keep my mails for me. Actually even my gmail is kept locally as a local cached copy in my Thunderbird's email folders - which means I can see all previously downloaded mail even off-line. So even if this happened to me, I'd at least have been able to re-instate my mails (not that I'd have liked to use my bandwidth to upload them to gmail though).

Point here is (as always) ... backup ... backup ... backup ... and then if still in doubt ... backup again ... no matter what email service provider / program you have! Few remember that emails need to be backed up as well, and unfortunately most backup systems only backup files - so most email client programs have issues with backups. E.g.: Say you have Outlook. Your mail is contained inside one single file (per account usually) - which can be an enormous file. If you have your backup system store that file, you have a backup of all your mail. The next time the backup system does its thing it needs to re-copy that entire file again (even if there was only one single mail added). Further, say you've accidentally erased a message a week or so ago - only realizing your mistake now. So you restore the backup from last week ... oops, BIG MISTAKE, you've just lost all other messages since last week's backup. Now while Thunderbird "slightly" alleviates this, you're still stuck with the same issues - only now per folder instead of per account.

One way we use for our business mails is to have a local IMAP server onto which you drag any project related mails. This server then gets backed up at the same time as our normal file server does. Depending in the IMAP server software it can save each message as a single MSG/EML file - thus you can restore one message only (instead of an entire folder / account). You can install a small IMAP server on your own PC (no need for an elaborate network) - but it's going to take some savvy to have it work perfectly for you (i.e. no need to drag your mails to it).

An alternative way I use for my own personal mail backup is to save the messages to EML files from Thunderbird (using the Import/Export Message addon). Unfortunately this is only manual (so I have to remember to do it otherwise I have no backup) - it would have been wonderful if it did this automatically ... or even more wonderful if you could use a decent email client which uses EML files directly instead of some arb PST / MBox / etc. file conglomerations. I know Outlook can save messages in a MSG file format, but can't remember if you can save an entire folder at once, and AFAIK it's also still a manual task.

Or perhaps you can get hold of a backup system which can backup/restore mails direct in the PST/MBox files without needing to first export them, though I haven't seen many of those.

[Perform Computers]

If anyone would like me to code a backup program for them, give me a shout. It'll be a desktop icon where you simply double click and it backs up whatever to wherever.

[irneb]

If anyone would like me to code a backup program for them, give me a shout. It'll be a desktop icon where you simply double click and it backs up whatever to wherever.

Would this backup the mails inside the PST files from Outlook instead of simply copying the entire PST file like all other backup systems I've seen?

The major problem is the user needs the ability to restore one single EMAIL without needing to wangle some weird way of opening a duplicate PST file and then dragging the email from there. This would usually also not work since most backup system would have a restore function which would "restore" the old PST file (overwriting the current one). That's fine for restoring a crashed hard-drive when the entire PST file is corrupt / blank, but not for lost / accidentally deleted data!