emails..If.. my hosting provider shut down.. best practices for backup?

Banter
1

This is a general question about back-up emails.
The other day for few hours I didn’t have email service, because Hostdime has some issue… It’s all resolved but let’s say tomorrow for some reason my hosting provider shut down.

All my emails are gone!?!

What is my alternative way to continue to do business and have all my emails?

I have a typical IMAP setup and I paid Web Shared Hosting.

Is there is software that will duplicate and store the emails?

2

I used to receive around 150 mails from clients on a daily basis — most mails would contain some sort of attachment. I organised my mail by customer groups (based on geographical location) and used a mail archive app to archive and restore mails (including attachments).
Since Apple installed an archive option in its Mail.app, most of these third party apps seem to have disappeared.
Apples “Archive” option is a manual process and is not especially flexible.
There are currently three [four] other options that I know of:

  1. Archive directly in Mail.app — manual process
  2. http://www.mailbackupx.com Fully automated and flexible incremental backups. Restore single mails, or complete mailboxes. I’ve not tested it, but it is reported to be good. There’s a trial version.
  3. http://www.squashedsoftware.com has a free app Email Backup (without a restore function) and a paid app Email Backup Pro. Automated backups (not incremental) restore any complete backup.
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3

I have a copy of Mozilla Thunderbird installed just for archiving emails.
I don’t like Thunderbird for actual email usage but it does enable me to download messages to an archive folder, every so often I’ll fire up Thunderbird and copy then delete the oldest 6/12 months worth.

This is the Thunderbird add-on I use to simplify the process: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/

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4

Thanks I will take a look.
But I have 3 iMacs/people so not sure if they will backup manually.

Maybe I should look my Synology if I can do something. But I don’t want setup as a server email, maybe is too risky?

Thanks

5

I use Outlook for Mac (and iOS)- I not only love the functionality of it, but also the archive feature. I copy emails (sent and received) to my hard drive all the time. It works great, and the find feature does too.

6

  1. Sync the emails via IMAP to a desktop app like mail

  2. set up the new provider email address

  3. upload the emails from the desktop app to the new server, also via IMAP

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7

interesting idea… I will need to figure out.
Thanks @Jannis

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