Marco Luthe Online!

I must admit, up ’til 10 minutes ago, I had a very complicated eMail structure.

All but one of my non-GMail accounts that I use were redirected to my main non-GMail account where all incoming eMails were stored and a copy was sent to my GMail account. The reason for saving them separately in that account was to download them via Thunderbird POP3 to have a local copy of all my eMails.

Plus:
I use GMail in 99.99% of all cases, because I really like the nice and easy interface. So, to have a local copy of my OUTGOING messages, I always BCC’ed myself to my non-GMail (storage) account.

“WTF?”, you might think… “Why not use GMail IMAP instead?”

And you are right! I don’t even know why I had that complicated structure in the first place – and I am glad I got rid of it.

I always wondered how I could keep a local copy of my GMail-Account. I want to get along without installing a “big” separate app like Thunderbird (which I only used to backup my non-GMail POP3 main storage account so far).

My question was: How can I just easily sync and backup my GMail account so that I have a local copy?

The answer is the Thunderbird Portable Edition in combination with MozBackup. Add your GMail account to TB, then select “File -> Offline -> Download/Sync now…” to download and sync all the mails of your GMail account (IMAP must be activated) onto your harddrive. Then you can use MozBackup to make a weekly / monthly update, just as you wish.

First, I found a different idea on Timbobs Blog [DE] where he describes how to use the application IMAPsize to backup GMail – but I liked the idea from this comment on his post to use the Thunderbird Portable Edition much better.