How to backup your email to your computer

People are often looking for ways to feel better knowing their trove of emails is safe. I’ve found a simple method that works reliably for me, and anyone can do!

First, install the Thunderbird mail client. It’s a free email tool that has a lot of settings for mail providers entered in to it already. If it doesn’t have settings for your email, it’s very similar to setting up a phone. I recommend setting up your email account as IMAP, because POP can sometimes erase messages from the server, and you may not intend to do that.

Anyway, once Thunderbird is installed and set up, to sync folders other than your inbox, simply click on them on the left hand side and give it some time for the folder to synchronize. It’s impossible to know how long this will take, due to variables like your internet connection or the size of your folder. Just watch the status bar in the bottom right to know when the sync is finished.

Once completed, create a folder where you would like your messages in that folder to be backed up. If you want, you could for instance create a folder on your desktop, and then create subfolders to match each and every one of your folders in your email account, and back them up one at a time.

Once the folder is created locally, simply highlight and drag emails from the Thunderbird client window to your local folder. To bring everything in the folder over at once, you can use Control A to “Select All,” or hold Shift and click the top, then bottom email. Once you drag everything to the local folder, you will see it create “.eml” files of every individual piece of mail. These are standard email files and are compatible with other email clients, like Outlook and the native Windows 10 Mail client.

If you wanted to move those emails into a new account, you could simply set up that account in Thunderbird, and drag files back to the folder in the other direction!

That YouTube Thing

10+ years ago, when YouTube was still new, I remember thinking it would never take off. I lived in a rural part of the country where bandwidth was a rarity, and I didn’t think most normal people would be making videos of themselves and posting them on the internet any time soon. Flash forward to an era where people live stream their trip to the grocery store, and I’ve been proven wrong.

Well, a few years ago I jumped on part of that bandwagon and made a few videos with some early tech or gaming related tips (how to take an offline Xbox 360 Gamertag on-line while keeping your Achievements, stuff like that). Then I started a gaming channel. Then I did more tech videos back on my channel for this website. Now I’m at the point where I just, frankly, want to merge the two. I’m bound to lose a few subscribers during the transition, but I’m small enough that’s not going to matter much anyway.

I’ll be posting a video on the gaming channel, called OurStorySoFarTV (to go along with the videos I’ve been posting here right along, see below) – and eventually I’m going to re-upload all 99 episodes of OSSFTV to the new channel, which can easily be found at: https://YouTube.com/NuAngelDOTnet.

Please consider following that link and subscribing to video content that goes up on NuAngel.net. It will be very much like this website – a combination of tech, gaming, and even other things. To welcome people to the channel, I have a very interesting, albeit brief, gaming-related video going up in just a few hours – be sure to check it out! I’ve already brought over some of my game-collection videos if you’re looking for stuff to watch right this minute!