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Saving Emails Locally

Saving Emails locally on your computer can help save space in your inbox. How do you manage storing emails with a email account that has a storage limit? 

saving emails locally

If you are using a POP email provider, from your own domain, you most likely have a storage limit. Unlike email providers like Google or Yahoo, POP email accounts have various limits to how much data you can hold in your inbox or the size of the attachments when sending an email. Check with your hosting provider to know what the limits are for your email account. 

Error sending/receiving email

You may not realize there is a problem until you notice you cant send anything out of your inbox. If you are lucky, your mail client will let you know there is an issue sending or connection to the email server. Some error messages you get will alert you that your file attachments are too big or your account is full. 

Thats one reason, but here are a few more reason you would want tThere are a few reasons why someone might want to save their online emails locally on their desktop or a USB drive:

  1. Backup: Saving emails locally can provide a backup of important or sensitive information that might be lost if something were to happen to the online account.

  2. Accessibility: Having a local copy of emails allows a person to access them even if they don’t have an internet connection or if the online account is down for some reason.

  3. Organization: Saving emails locally can make it easier to organize and search through old emails, as opposed to trying to do so through an online interface.

  4. Transferability: If a person is switching to a new email provider, they might want to save their old emails locally in order to transfer them to the new account.

  5. Security: Some people might prefer to have a local copy of their emails in order to have more control over their data and to reduce the risk of it being accessed by unauthorized parties.

Saving Emails Locally on a Mac computer

Now that you have some reason you should, let’s go ahead and try saving some emails locally. 

Open the Mail app on your Mac desktop. Select the On My Mac icon with the plus icon in the sidebar. 

Enter the name of your folder and make sure the location is set to On My Mac.

On My Mac Mailbox Folder

Saving Emails Locally on a Windows computer

Open your windows based mail client. Most likely it would be Outlook. There are some alternative open-source mail clients such as Thunderbird. However, we will stick with a popular client used in schools and work environments, Outlook. 

 

For Windows, its as simple as;

  1. Creating a folder on your desktop or your usb drive. 
  2. Select all the emails in your inbox that you want to save to your local folder (Ctrl+A).
  3. Drag the selected emails from your inbox, over and into the newly created folder.

It may take a few minutes to move the file, but you will now have the files off your email server and onto your local computer.

 

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