Just over a week ago, Gmail was hit by a breakdown that meant that 150,000 users could not access their mailboxes on the email service. It also took several days for Google to restore everything to normal.
Although most cloud services have very good backup procedures, there are no guarantees. If you want to be on the safe side, there are tools to back up your webmail to the hard drive.
Gmail
Gmail Backup is a free program that easily copies your entire Gmail account to your hard drive. Remember that you have enough space on your hard drive, as it can easily become quite large amounts of information on Gmail if you have used the account for a long time. Gmail Backup is available for Windows and Linux.
Hotmail
For users of Hotmail, there is the program Mailstore Home. The program also works with Gmail, however, Mailstore Home is not as easy to use as Gmail Backup. Mailstore Home is also free.
Yahoo Mail
Backing up the emails on Yahoo is a little trickier as the service does not offer access to a so-called pop mailbox. However, it is possible to get around the problem by downloading a program called Zimbra Desktop.
Once you have installed the program, you choose to synchronize it with your email account on Yahoo. When the synchronization is complete, all emails have been copied to your hard drive. You can choose to export all messages from Zimba Desktop to so-called eml files that can be read by most e-mail programs.
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