How to Create E-Mail Backups
Local backups, account backups and continuous backup are all useful ways to preserve your e-mail history.
Use an e-mail client to create a local copy
Mozilla Thunderbird will be used for this example but other mail clients like Outlook or Mac Mail have similar options.
- Set up Thunderbird to connect to your email account via IMAP. See this article for complete instructions.
- Create a local folder for your mail.

Drag e-mail messages and folders to the Local folder.

Full account backup
If you have a full account backup, e-mail is backed up in it. To access saved emails in a full account backup, follow these instructions:
Get an assist from Thunderbird
The methods described below expose text files that contain the stored emails. The files can be read with a text editor but a much more familiar view is gained by importing them into a mail client. You can easily add a versatile import (and export) component to Thunderbird with the ImportExportTools addon for Thunderbird.

Plesk
- Unzip the backup file to an empty directory.
- In the unzipped files look for a file named similar to backup_domainmail_XXXXXXXX.zip where the Xs will be some numbers.
- Unzip the backup_domainmail_XXXXXXXX.zip file into an empty directory.
- After the file is unzipped, inside the new directory will be directories named for all the email users.
- Open the user directory to see directories for Inbox and other folders that were in the users email account.

- Inside the Inbox and other folders are text files that can be read with a text editor or imported into Thunderbird or any email client with the appropriate import feature.
cPanel
- Unzip the backup file to an empty directory.
- Depending on the tool used, you may also need to untar the extracted file but some archive tools will complete the unzip and untar in one step.
- Look in the extracted files for the homedir directory.
- Inside the homedir directory, look for the mail directory.
- Inside the mail directory look for the domain name of the e-mail address.
- Inside the domain name directory will be directories named for the individual users.
- Open a user directory to see the files and folders for the individual email account.

- The files may be read with a text editor or imported into Thunderbird or any client with the appropriate import feature.
Continuous Backup
Dropmysite
Dropmysite is a continuous offsite backup system for files, databases, and e-mail. It is offered as an addon to many A2 Hosting packages. With Dropmysite you can restore e-mails individually or in a group. To read more about Dropmysite, see these articles.
E-mail Forwarders
An e-mail forwarder can send a copy of every e-mail received to another email address to create a continuous backup of all mails received. Forwarders will not automatically backup your sent mails but you can include the backup e-mail address as a BCC on all mail sent to have a complete backup. Some e-mail clients include a feature to automatically make a copy of every sent mail.
See this article to learn how to configure an e-mail forwarder in Plesk.
See this article to learn how to configure an e-mail forwarder in cPanel.
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