MailStore Home is a free program that can backup your email from multiple email applications/accounts and consolidate these into a single, centralized archive that it can burn into a backup CD. Also offers the ability to perform advanced searches and quickly view archived email. Supported email clients include Outlook, Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Exchange, as well as POP/IMAP accounts (including all webmail services that IMAP or POP support such as Gmail and Yahoo), and local files.
This program can backup your email from a wide range of supported applications and services (including webmail services such as gmail) into a single centralized archive. It offers a high degree of configurability in terms of what you want and do not want it to backup, and allows for exporting your email across applications (so, for example, you can export your Outlook email into Thunderbird). More notes below:
- Backup options: you can tell it which folders you want backed-up and which ones you don’t. This might be useful if, say, you send a lot of email newsletters to certain folder(s) and do not care to have these backed up. Note that backups are incremental, such that Mailstore will add to the existing archive only those emails that have been added since the last backup.
- Exporting mail: if you need to you can select a folder structure or email/emails and export these into a another supported application (e.g. Outlook to Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc.). You could also back them up to CD, save them individually to IMAP or hard disk , or even forward them by SMTP to an email address.
- The user experience: is tremendous. This is a sleek looking program that is well designed overall intuitive to use.
- Supported email clients/services: Outlook, Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Exchange, as well as POP/IMAP accounts and local files. Archiving webmail: such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL is possible, but Hotmail is not (Mailstore can archive any service that have a POP3 nor an IMAP server, which Hotmail doesn’t). See this page and this page for more info on configuring webmail.
- Other supported programs: any application that is available in a standardized format (RFC822, often called EML or MIME format, and MBOX). A bit of research confirmed that this would include the following clients: Pegasus, Eudora, Netscape, Pocomail. Some, like “The Bat” can export to MBOX format. Supports drag and drop folder of Mbox file to the MailStore interface to import.
- Delete imported email: this option will delete email from your email client once it is backed up based on rules you specify. You could set it, for example, to always delete email that is more than 1 year old whenever you run a backup, knowing that it is archived if you ever need to get to it.
Search and view email: you can browse your folder structure manually for backed up email or use an advanced search function to help you find the archived email(s) you seek (see screenshot to the right, which I altered to protect my privacy). Search is ultra fast, and you can even save search criteria for later use. MailStore also provides a nice interface for viewing your emails, as well as a number of exporting functions (discussed above in “exporting email”).- Consolidated archive: some notes on this (a) you can define the save location of this as you like, (b) this will consolidate the emails from all programs, accounts, or services into a centralized place, (c) the archive is compressed; e.g. my 1.3+ Outlook PST file was backed up into a little over 500 megs, and finally (d) it is secure: the MailStore website asserts that messages are stored MIME-compatible “and can be recovered at any time without information loss”.
- Attachments: are supported by default; however, it is possible to optionally define rules for the types of files that you would like to include in the backup (e..g .ZIP, .XLS, .JPG etc.)
- Burning to CD: MailStore will burn your data directly into CD or DVD straight without the need for an external program.
Differences between the free and paid versions: MailStore Home is a freeware version intended for individual use; for commercial use you need to buy a licence. The developer’s of MailStore also offer MailStore Server that provides a central solution for your business.
Wish list:
- Scheduled backups: although there is a “schedule” button, it is inactive. Not sure if this is going to be enabled in future versions.
- An internal dedupe function: within individual accounts. This would be great for those who synchronize emails across different computers and face the issue of having emails duplicated.
The verdict: simply a fantastic program that is both well designed and very powerful. I would recommend this over other free email backup programs (e.g. Amic Email Backup, MozBackup). Might just be the only email backup program that you will ever need.
[Thanks to reader Dale for informing me about this in the comments section of a related posting].
Version Tested: 2.5.1 (b3216)
Compatibility: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista.
Go to the MailStore Home page to download the latest version (approx 11 megs).
just what i was looking for …. and at the right time too… will check it out rightaway !!
tx dude…
Smart and beautiful, just like my GF! – A gem!
I thought Hotmail had POP access? Or is that still a paid-for feature? Sorry if I’m wrong – never had a Hotmail account
try amic email backup
http://www.amictools.com/v-amic_email_backup.html
includes a scheduler, also freeware
Amic Email Backup doesn’t handle as many Email clients as MailStore does, including Thunderbird for instance … Amic is fine for Microsoft & Microsoft, Associates
One major problem – in Outlook – if you move messages from the inbox to other folders Mailstore does not reindex – this can create a database of thousands of dupe messages over time – and if you moved the message, Maillstore still thinks it is in the inbox and will display the msg from both the inbox (no longer there) and the folder you moved it to. Further there is no way to clear or flush the index without going in manually and deleting the entire database by hand. It is a pain and a big drawback. I have exchanged emails with them and they have no fix for this – yet.
John, you are wrong. MailStore synchronizes the folder structure while archiving. If you move a message within e.g. Outlook from one to another folder, MailStore will recognize this when you archive again.
I have been using it for a few months and this is great software, beautifully designed, works without problems. The search function is powerful enough and handles unicode without problems.
Great! Alas, too late for recovering from my last Windows crash (why didn’t I hear of you before, I’ve subscribed to freewaregenius by RRS feed) but on starting all ovr the one thing I couldn’t get from my backups without risk of importing whatever gave me trouble in the first place – was all the mail.
I’m a writer. Over the last three years I had gathered about 50 GB of information (not media files, so they were a ‘lean’ 50 GB. I must have been able to recover lees than half.
On the other hand (and new here, you may have commented on this already): Like moving houses; what an amazing amount of junk one can get rid of!
And another lesson, I’m installing Ubuntu on the drive of my (two) working computers, with Open Office (another astonishing discovery), Gimp (though I have a working Photoshop) and whatever other open source and free license ware I can find.
Thank goodness I found you. Via another post in another blog or forum, but I’m here. Thank you
Peter
now, after my post on apr 22, i downloaded and started using mailstore – so far i have tried only the archive part of it – i hv archived about 3.5 gb of mails from thunderbird
next is to try moving this archive into outlook – that should be in may 1st week – will update you guys on how it goes… cheers
Tried and highly appreciated. Excelent find!
For recover deleted mails advise use-Recovery Toolbox for Outlook,tool helped me many times as far as i know application is free,software can preview analysis results and make a decision, which messages should be extracted,it has two ways to recover your data: you can convert corrupted mailbox to another mailbox in *.pst format, it can be opened by any email client, compatible with Microsoft Outlook,compatible with all supported versions of Windows operating system, starting from Windows 98,can extract all files separately: *.eml, *.txt and *.vcf documents will be placed to any folder upon your choice.
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you for sharing this great article. I am always looking for informative information like this. You are bookmarked! Have a good day.