I recently had one of my users request me to make a one-off backup of his entire Yahoo! mailbox as he was noticing some funky stuff going on with his contacts (they disappeared). He was fearing that the server where his mail was stored was going to give up the ghost soon.
While I half-heartedly doubted that, I did want to accomplish what he requested.
Another use? Merging mail for when you want to retire that AOL account.
Enter MailStore Home, a very nice freebie application that can connect to your mail accounts and download the entire thing to your computer to search or export to another client.
Archiving = good, searchable = better
Archiving is nice and all, but MailStore also grants you the capability of searching and exporting archived messages. Searching would be very useful for road-warriors who do not have online connectivity and need to do some email scanning. The exporting function is useful for those times when you need to pull some content out and use it for something else.
Backing up an account is a simple affair. Just pick your provider, start the wizard, and let ‘er rip! Typically, the setup consists of no more than you entering you email address and account password. Once that’s done, the program takes over.
Back it up!
When you start the backup wizard, you be able to review and change some options that allow you to control the backup process. For example, you could allow MailStore to back up your spam/trash folders in addition to the normal set of emails that you would really want.
It seems that with Windows Live mail (this may be true of other cached email clients specified) that MailStore backs up what has already been synchronized offline to the client. for example, when I backed up a Hotmail account (yes, I still have one…old habits die hard), it only archived the messages that I have viewed locally. Ok, I've archived from a local cache, and while efficient, this doesn’t quite suit my needs. If you want to make sure you have everything, you may need to tell the client (Windows Live Mail is ‘Shift’+’F5’) to download all mail content, which could take awhile, then run MailStore.
Another thing I noticed: There isn’t a way to export contacts. This may be due to the inconsistent way that the various providers store them – they aren’t standard mail objects, after all.
I would like to see a way to schedule MailStore to perform backups? Has anyone done this?
Restore into another mail system
This is BY FAR the most useful feature, although you couldn’t take advantage of it if the rest of the features weren’t here… :)
Like any good archiving program, MailStore does grant you the capability of exporting backed-up email. The cool thing is that you can export mail directly into another supported mail configuration: for example, export your gmail content into Exchange, your Yahoo! mail into GMail. A custom IMAP account into your POP account. Now THAT is way better than exporting to a comma separated values file.
In my exchange configuration, MailStore created a folder called ‘MailStore Export’ > name_of_mailstore_profile > name_of_folder_exported.
Insanely useful.
Server product available
MailStore does have a server product that you can use at your workplace for number of server platforms (incl. Exchange, Groupwise, Courier, MDaemon – no Notes?) which allows for email archiving for multiple clients and PST files…this also features the same Home version advantages on a managed level.
Likes:
- Export archived mail into a different mail setup - major
- Specify individual folders to back up. Although for some clients, if you’ve not cached the folder structure, it might be unclear that you are really getting everything (I’m looking at you, Windows Live) - medium
- EASY backup wizard. You usually just supply an email account and password - major
- Can archive an Exchange account. NICE - major
- Allows you to delete from your mailbox what you’ve archived (not available for Exchange account backup) - medium
- Only archive a date span if you wish - major
- Search everything at once - major
- Ability to search attachments, although you need to specify which attachments you’d like to index - major
- See above ‘like’ about individual folders for backup (cached clients might garner incomplete folder structures) - medium
- A little unclear exactly where you are backing up from (Windows Live Mail) - medium
- Needs more prevalent ‘Home’ button. Took me a bit to get out of a sub screen which almost looked like a home screen to the true ‘Home’ - low
- No apparent way to schedule backups? - medium
- Doesn’t download contacts or calendar – minor (after all it is called ‘MailStore’) - low
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