With recent horror stories of Google users getting locked out of their accounts floating around the Internet, it makes you reconsider putting so much trust in Google. A lot of people have all their eggs in the Google basket, but they could too be locked out at any given time. Gmail could also go down or lose some of your email when you need it most. Here’s a method for archiving all your email to a local machine using a Gmail account and a POP3 email client.

1. Create a Gateway Email Account

I call this a gateway account because all your archived email will pass through this account. If you’ve already got one, make sure you can dedicate it to this sole purpose. If not, head over to Gmail and sign up for an account. Once you’ve got the account set up, we can start forwarding email to it.

2. Gathering Email

There are two ways to accomplish this and both methods are outlined assuming you’re getting email from another Gmail account (Google Apps for Your Domain works this way too). Method A involves forwarding a copy of your email to your gateway account; Method B involves grabbing email using POP3 from your gateway account.

a. Forwarding Email

This is pretty straight forward. Go into each of the Gmail accounts you wish to forward email from and click on the Settings link in the upper right, then click on the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Check the radio button next to “Forward a copy” and then enter the address for your gateway account. You’ll probably want to select keep Gmail’s copy in the inbox, especially if you intend on using the address. When you’re finished, click Save Changes.

b. Popping Email

Gmail has directions on enabling POP for your archive accounts, which is just step one. The beauty of this method is that you can set this up for any account that supports POP, which is just about every email service on the planet. Even if you’re not using Gmail, you can employ similar techniques to get this working.

Once you’ve enabled POP for your account, you can start pulling email from up to five accounts into your gateway account. Again, Google has directions on enabling Mail Fetcher, so check those out.

3. Setting Up the Email Client

There are a ton of applications you can use to do this, but I recommend using Mozilla Thunderbird (it’s free, fast, and just good). The basic idea is to set up Thunderbird to grab copies of email from your gateway account – and subsequently all other accounts funneled into it – and store them locally. Google already has good directions on how to do this, so I won’t reinvent the wheel.

Some tips for setting up your POP3 client are to make sure you enable POP for all mail and keep Gmail’s copy in the inbox (just in case). If you’re funneling high volumes of email into your gateway, you’ll want to keep an eye on your gateway’s disk quota so you don’t go over the limit. You could also tell Gmail to remove the server’s copy once you download it. After you do that, you can proceed with setting up Thunderbird.

FYI – You can also do this with Apple Mail 3.0, Outlook Express, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, or Windows Mail.

4. Safely Storing the Archive

The final step is to make sure you’re storing the archive somewhere safe. If you trust your computer, you can just leave it as is. But, the whole point of this article is having a backup, so I recommend putting a copy of the email archive somewhere safe, such as Dropbox. Any cloud storage solution will work and most offer around 2GB of storage, which should be plenty. You can also use an old-fashioned CD or thumb drive if you so desire.

To grab the mail archive from Thunderbird, you need to find your profile folder. This folder is generally a hidden folder, so you’ll need to unhide folders temporarily if you’ve got them hidden. The x characters below will be a random string, so don’t actually look for xxxxxxxx.default.

• In XP, go to C:\Documents and Settings\[User]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
• In Vista, go to C:\Users\[User]\AppData\Local\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
• In Leopard, go to ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/
• In Ubuntu, go to ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.default/

Your safest bet is to copy the entire profile folder to ensure you get everything. Once you’ve got that, throw it into your Dropbox in a folder named email_backup or something similarly indicative of its contents. Keep in mind the folders you’ll put into Dropbox are cumulative, meaning they’ll contain all the email that Thunderbird knows about.

5. Automate

Well, this isn’t really automation in the true spirit, but you can leave your Thunderbird running in the background grabbing email every 5 or so minutes. Then, you can set up automatic exports in Linux or OS X to copy your backup into your Dropbox. I don’t have advice on how to do that in anything other than Linux, so I’ll skip this step. Just be aware that it’s possible.

All your email are belong to you…

That’s it, 5 simple steps to backing up your email. Look for an article soon on importing email to Thunderbird from this backup. I’ll also be covering a similar solution using Gmail Backup which will use a lot of the same techniques, but will omit the use of Thunderbird.