Many of us have multiple e-mail accounts at multiple providers. While it’s great to have “everything in the cloud”, you should always have your own backups at home. I recently found a slick product for doing this called Mailstore Home Edition. Mailstore works with Outlook, Windows Mail, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Google Mail (GMail), and generic IMAP/POP3 accounts. Mailstore sets up a database for each account, but treats the offline backup as one datastore. In my case, I have my main leinss.com e-mail accounts and a throwaway account at hotmail.com.
I have both leinss.com and hotmail.com (via the Hotmail connector) accounts setup in Outlook 2010. I just tell Mailstore to back all the accounts I have setup in Outlook. Once the backup is done, I can now take this e-mail and restore it to a new provider. I can also search across all e-mail accounts at lightning speed: it’s on my hard drive!
Take a look at the powerful search options:
Best of all: it’s freeware for home use!
– Soli Deo Gloria