Extract Online E-mails?

SirWinner · Post by **SirWinner** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 10:35 am

Cannot seem to find much useful information on how to say extract all my online e-mail clutter from the Web to say my local hard drive from the inbox on each of these online e-mail clients:

- Hotmail (2 Accounts)
- Yahoomail (1 Account)
- Gmail (2 Accounts)

1 of the 5 accounts is for my personal correspondence, the other 4 are used for various other purposes such as sign ups for online games, etc.

Would prefer not having to forward the hundreds of e-mails one by one from all my online e-mail accounts.

Just want to clean out all those e-mails and back them up on my local PC.

If I could stay away from Microsoft Outlook that would be a preferred method... If there isn't a practical way to do it otherwise.

Any ideas?

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 10:44 am

you should be able to set all those to use POP3, and thusly download them that way. but that could be a download them all at once type prospect.

IMAP would be better, you can back your emails at your leisure. Gmail supports IMAP.

CDN_Merlin · Post by **CDN_Merlin** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 10:45 am

I haven't heard of any easy way to do it. I forward each one. This is why I use Outlook and link it to my ISP account. My hotmail I use for jobs and don't get many emails in it.

SirWinner · Post by **SirWinner** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 12:18 pm

fliptw,

I delete the spam on a regular basis but there is quite an archive of e-mails in my inbox on the hotmail accounts.

The download them all at once method is exactly what is needed... that would remove all the e-mails from the online e-mail inbox and put the e-mails on my local hard drive.

Google seems to have some information on Gmail... can't seem to get that information via the Hotmail site yet... need to look on the Yahoomail site.

Thanks for your feedback.

My intention is to use Mozilla Thunderbird as the e-mail client on my home pc to retrieve the e-mails in question.

I'll dig further into this matter.

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 2:02 pm

I recomend not having your client delete the mail from the server if you are going to use POP3.

If you can use IMAP, do so, it only downloads the headers for your mail, and downloads the rest when you open it, so you can pick thru what you want to back up rather than waiting for all of your email to come down.

SirWinner · Post by **SirWinner** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 3:28 pm

Sorry about posting this on the wrong forum...DOH me!

So rarely visit any more that I forgot about the tech forum!

My goal is to download all the messages so that I have the e-mails only on my local pc and clear out the e-mail off of the online web sites. (Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail.)

The only LOAD will be the first time that it does the download of the messages from each e-mail account, then only the few messages that get pull down on an occasional basis... say once a week. Before those messages would be pulled down, was planning on looking at the messages on the web sites, then clearing out the \"junk\" then and only then download the messages.

Before start the e-mail download process, plan on doing a test of the procedure a dummy e-mail account on each site to make sure it works, then do each e-mail account.

P. S. Backup of the e-mail would be done to CD-Rom or DVD-ROM on a regular basis!

SirWinner · Post by **SirWinner** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 6:22 pm

Found the Gmail method here: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answ ... swer=86399

I'm sure it is similar on the Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.

Wheeeeeee!

Top Wop · Post by **Top Wop** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 6:24 pm

You cant IMAP into yahoo mail, that is a service you have to pay for.