Gmail Backup is a program that is aimed to backup and restore of your GMail mailbox. You will need to activate the IMAP access to your mailbox, to do so, please open your GMail settings and under POP/IMAP tab activate this option. Ever since the introduction of Gmail, more and more people are relying on Gmail as the primary email contact. However, recently there are more and more reports of Gmail outage and even Gmail account being deleted without the owner’s consent.

To start backup, simply download Gmail Backup and make sure your IMAP service is enabled.

Then to perform full backup of your GMail account into directory dir, use:

gmail-backup.exe backup dir user@gmail.com password

To specify time interval, you can add additional date specification in the format YYYYMMDD. The second date can be ommited in which case the backup is from the first date to now:

gmail-backup.exe backup dir user@gmail.com password 20070621 20080101

You can do multiple backups into the same directory. The labels.txt is updated according the new e-mails not in the previous backup.

To restore your backup use the restore command. To restore your GMail account from the previous backup in the directory dir, use for example:

gmail-backup.exe restore dir user@gmail.com password

You can also use the extra feature of GMail backup. It allows the user to completely clear his mailbox (for example if the user wants to end using the GMail). All messages are permanently deleted (of course the email can be stored somewhere deep in the Google company). To do so, execute the command:

gmail-backup.exe clear user@gmail.com password

Download Gmail Backup.