Backing up your email

Our daily server-level backups include all your email. But you may also want copies on your own infrastructure for archives, compliance, or peace of mind. Here are the options.

Option 1: IMAP local copies (easiest)

Configure an email client (Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook) to use IMAP for the account. The client downloads messages locally as it browses; over time, you accumulate a complete local mirror.

Most clients have a setting like:

• "Keep messages on this Mac for offline use" (Apple Mail)
• "Synchronize all folders" (Thunderbird)
• "Cached Exchange Mode" (Outlook)

Enable it. Now your computer has a copy of every email. Your computer's backup (Time Machine, Backblaze, Windows backup) covers the email automatically.

Trade-offs:

• ✅ Easy: no extra tools.
• ✅ Continuous: every new message is in the local copy soon after it arrives.
• ⚠️ Tied to the client: switching email clients later requires re-downloading.
• ⚠️ Depends on your computer's reliability.

Option 2: Full mailbox export from webmail

For point-in-time archives:

1. Open webmail (Roundcube).
2. Select the messages you want to export (or "select all" within a folder).
3. Roundcube's More menu → Save as eml or Download .mbox depending on version.
4. Save the file locally.

You get a single archive file containing the messages. Standard .mbox files can be imported into most email clients.

Trade-offs:

• ✅ Manual control over what to back up.
• ⚠️ Folder-by-folder; not great for the whole account.
• ⚠️ Roundcube's UI can be slow with thousands of messages selected.

Option 3: cPanel email backup

For a complete server-side backup:

1. Open cPanel from your hosting service.
2. Find Backup Wizard under Files.
3. Choose Email forwarders and filters OR a full home directory backup (which includes email storage).
4. Download the resulting archive.

Email is stored in Maildir format under /home/your-account/mail/. The Backup Wizard downloads this directory as a .tar.gz.

Trade-offs:

• ✅ Complete: every message, every folder, all metadata.
• ✅ Server-side: doesn't depend on a local client.
• ⚠️ Format is Maildir, harder to browse manually than .mbox.
• ⚠️ Large files (entire mailbox) — slow to download, slow to restore.

Option 4: Third-party email backup tools

For automated, scheduled, off-site backups:

• MailStore Home (free, Windows) — periodic IMAP backup, with full-text search.
• MBox Vault — paid, multi-platform.
• Aid4Mail — paid, robust converter and archiver.
• Custom script — imapsync is a popular open-source tool for syncing IMAP accounts to local storage.

Run on a schedule (daily, weekly) to keep your archive current.

Trade-offs:

• ✅ Continuous and automated.
• ✅ Independent of email client choice.
• ⚠️ Setup overhead.

Restoring from backup

How you restore depends on what kind of backup you have:

• IMAP local copies: restoring is just re-uploading via IMAP. Drag and drop the messages from local to the IMAP folder.
• .mbox files: import in Thunderbird, Apple Mail, or any client that supports the format.
• Maildir from cPanel backup: extract the archive, drop the Maildir folders back into /home/your-account/mail/yourdomain.com/. Or restore the entire account from our server-level backups via the Backups tile.
• MailStore / Aid4Mail archives: use the same tool to export back to IMAP.

For full-account restores from disasters, our server-level backups are usually the right tool — restore from the portal, no manual reconstruction needed.

How long do we keep server-level backups?

30 days. Daily snapshots, kept for 30 days, then rotated out. Older messages exist in the live mailbox unless you've deleted them; from the live mailbox they're recoverable until you empty Trash and Trash gets purged.

For longer retention than 30 days, set up your own backup workflow with one of the options above.

Power-user note

For very-large-mailbox backups (10GB+), imapsync is the right tool. It's a Perl script that syncs from one IMAP server to another (or to local files). Handles incremental sync, deletions, and folder hierarchy. Cron-able. Open source.

imapsync --host1 mail.yourdomain.com --user1 you@yourdomain.com --password1 ... \
         --host2 localhost --user2 archive --password2 ...

Common pattern: sync from your live account to a local IMAP server (Dovecot, etc.) running on a backup server.