How to Backup Important Mails?

My experience:
I am using yahoo as my primary email service for the past 6 years and after a long time I decided to change the password after reading a document on security. To make it more secure, I gave a password with lots of combination of characters. But, Alas! I forgot my new password the next day. All the important mails were stored in my Yahoo inbox. I can’t try some random passwords cause that made my account to be locked for about 24 hours. I contacted Yahoo but it’s of no help as I did not remember the details that I gave while registering for the account. For two days I couldn’t think of anything else but this. Finally I somehow figured it out and I was so much relieved.

This may not be the case with you but what if the mail server crashes and you don’t have copy of all those important mails and correspondence? So this stresses on the point that one should have to have a backup copy of all important mails. If all of your mails are delivered in your own domain, you can take a backup using the options given in the control panel. But more importantly you need to have a backup copy of important mails if you have your mails delivered to free email providers like Yahoo or Gmail.

So, how to take a backup copy of important mails from free service provider?
If you are using Gmail, this task is much simpler. There are two ways by which you can take a backup copy.

Option A:
You can use the POP access and use software like Outlook or Thunderbird to access mails directly in your system. Using the data management option you can map a location to store important mails. These mails are stored in your computer and you can take another backup if you want from there.

Option B:
This is much simpler than the earlier one. This does automatic backup without your intervention what so ever. Create another Yahoo or Gmail account which you can use just for saving a backup copy of your mails. Go to mail settings -> Forwarding and POP. Under forwarding, give the new email address and save. This will forward all the new mails you receive to another account, which will act as a backup in case you need one.

If you are using accounts which don’t give free forwarding or POP access like Yahoo, then you have to manually forward the important mails to the backup mail id you have. This is not cumbersome if you do it as and when you get it or you can have the forwarding access for a premium price.

Tips and points to ponder:

1) When you forward your mails manually, you can add a word or a set of characters in the Subject field and you can set up a filter in the receiving mail id so that the mails are grouped in their related folders.

2) Always organize your mails in different related folders, it helps in easy retrieval.

3) If you have another email account for storing a backup copy of important mails, don’t forget to login to that account once in a while so that the account doesn’t get closed and make sure you remember the password.