If you're like most people, you have an online email account, either GMail, Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail. You might trust Google or Yahoo not to lose your emails, but you just never know what's going to happen. I'd rather be safe than sorry, so I went about figuring out how to backup my GMail account to my local computer.

Pop It

The key is that GMail allows access to all of your emails via the POP3 protocol, a protocol that most email programs use. If you go into GMail settings, you can allow POP3 access to your account. Be sure to select the option that allows access to everything in your account from the time it was first started.

You can now use any standard email program to pull all of your emails off of GMail, including Outlook or the free Thunderbird. Be sure to set it up to not have them delete mail off the server. You still want to keep everything in GMail, I assume, so you don't want to delete the emails off of GMail after you download them.

Now you can open up your desktop email client every once in a while and download your emails to keep a local backup of your email. You'll have to run it multiple times at first, since GMail won't give you everything at once but will instead let you download in 100 message chunks. Just keep checking your mail until it downloads your most recent messages.

Advanced

For those advanced enough to get geeky with this, there's a great way in Windows, Linux and Mac to do this automatically using Fetchmail. Lifehacker has a great write up about this, but concentrates on Windows.

To do the same on Linux or a Mac, just follow the instructions on setting up Fetchmail in the Lifehacker article, but set up a cron job by calling:

crontab -e

And adding a line like this:

0 0 * * * fetchmail -k

That will now download any new mail off of GMail every night at midnight. Instant and automated backup of your GMail account.

Note that this does backup your sent mail. This makes is wonderful complete backup of GMail.

I wonder how secure most people think email is, especially when a company emails me my password or login information. There seems to be a lot of people that write things in email that they wouldn't want other people to see, so I want to be clear...

Email Is Not Secure

Not no how, not no way. Even if you connect to your email server over SSL, even if your ISP tells you it's secure and even if you've been sending things for years and haven't had a problem yet, email is not secure.

A lot of people think that email is a lot like regular mail; you put your message in an envelope, address it, hand it to your faithful US Post Office and off it goes through the US mail system, hand delivered to it's destination. If email worked like that, I would consider it secure.

But it doesn't work like that.

Think of email more like a postcard that's not in an envelope. And instead of being sent through the US mail system, you hand it to your neighbor who then continues to hand it down the line until it gets to it's destination. Everyone along the way can read your message and, more importantly, photocopy your message so they can read it later. Everything is right out in the open, including everything you wrote, and anyone can come along in the middle and take a look at the messages as they go by.

It's not exactly like that, but it's darn close. Even if you're careful about your email password and take care not to get your email account hacked, the person you send the email to, or one of the servers in between, might not be so careful.

I'm not saying don't use email, just be aware of what you're sending. You should never send passwords, personal information or anything confidential over email.

This is more of an FYI than anything, but future articles will talk about ways in which you can secure your email by putting it into a virtual envelope. The hard part here is getting everyone you send email to to do the same. Subscribe to the feed so you don't miss those posts.

It's looks like on Jan. 6th starting at about 10:00AM there is a massive spam flood going on to all of my email addresses. I've verified that other's are seeing it to. One weird thing is that it's not happening to my gmail account at all.

I typically get 100 emails a day, most being spam, but this morning I got 1500 emails in a 15 minute time span. It's also taking a really log time just to log into the ATT mailserver and the textdrive mail server. Since I have client side spam filtering using Spamato, my computer is almost pegged on CPU usage as well.

What is everyone else seeing?

UPDATE: Wow. Now I'm thinking that Thunderbird lost it's mind and redownloaded all of my email. Still looking at it though.