Back Up Your Email Using Thunderbird

If it’s only in one place, it’s not backed up.

Many years ago, I received a panic-stricken email from an individual whose account had been hacked. He had lost all access. His panic stemmed from the fact that, for whatever reason, the account held the only copy of his master’s thesis.

It was gone, and there was no hope of recovery.1

Hopefully, you’re not keeping something as important as a master’s thesis only in your online email account. That’s wrong on many levels. But I’m sure there are things in your account you never want to lose, such as photos, correspondence, or other things you’ve exchanged via email.

The problem is, of course, that if it’s only in your email account, it’s not backed up.

Let’s fix that. Let’s back up your email.

Backing up your email

Configure Thunderbird to access and download your email using IMAP settings to back it up. Leave Thunderbird running (or run it periodically) to make sure your backups are up to date. Periodically, export and download your contacts to back them up as well.

Our example: Outlook.com and Hotmail

For this article, I’m going to use a Hotmail account: askleoexample@hotmail.com. I’ll continue to access that account as I usually do, using the Outlook.com website, but we’ll back it up to my PC using Thunderbird.

The technique I’ll use applies to almost all online accounts, including Gmail, Yahoo!, and others. For this technique to work, the account must support a protocol called IMAP. The good news is that almost all email services support IMAP.

In this example, I’ll use Thunderbird as my desktop email program, but any desktop program supporting IMAP can back up your email, including Microsoft Office Outlook and others.

Install Thunderbird

The first step is to download and install Thunderbird. Download Thunderbird from the official download site here.2

At this writing, the official URL is https://www.thunderbird.net.

Download and run the Setup Wizard.

The first choice is whether to accept the Standard settings or use Custom.

Always choose Custom. Even though we’re going to accept all suggestions made by the installer, choosing Custom installation is an important habit to avoid malware and PUPs. Click Next through the subsequent settings, and accept:

• The installation location for Thunderbird.
• Installation of the “Maintenance Service”, which will keep Thunderbird up to date automatically.
• Creating icons for Thunderbird as you choose.

If there are additional options, read them carefully to make sure you understand what you’re agreeing to.

Click Install on the last page of the Wizard to install Thunderbird.

When the installation is complete, leave “Launch Mozilla Thunderbird now” checked and click Finish.

Thunderbird may offer to import settings from another mail program if one is installed. Our goal is to use Thunderbird simply for backup, so there’s no need to do that.

Configuring Thunderbird for a Hotmail account

When you first install Thunderbird, there are no email accounts configured. Thunderbird offers to “Add your email address”3.

Enter your name and email address and click on Continue. It may bring up the Thunderbird donation page in your browser, which you can ignore. Back in Thunderbird, it’ll give a summary of the choices it’s making based on its knowledge of Hotmail (aka Outlook.com) accounts.

Make sure that IMAP is selected. This allows Thunderbird to access your email without changing anything about how you’ve been using your email elsewhere, such as online.

If you have an email address or account that Thunderbird does not have a configuration for, you may need to get the information from your email provider and enter it manually here. The good news is that most major providers, like Outlook.com, Gmail, and many others, will set up automatically.

Click Continue.

At this point, either of two things will happen:

• If your machine has a passkey for the account, Thunderbird will use it to sign in.
• You may be asked by Microsoft to sign in and authorize Thunderbird to access your email.

The second step is handled by Microsoft because we’re using “OAuth” as the security protocol. Rather than having Thunderbird ask for and use a password to sign in, the authorization process is handed off to Microsoft. This allows all the authorization techniques, including two-factor authentication, to work. Once you’ve successfully authorized with Microsoft, a secure token is returned to Thunderbird indicating you’re good to go.

Thunderbird is now configured to access your Hotmail account and will begin downloading your mail.

Using Thunderbird

The benefit of using IMAP is that the email program downloads a copy to your computer, creating a backup of your email. You can continue to use your email normally via the Outlook.com web interface, your mobile device, or wherever else you’ve been accessing it.

You can, if you like, use Thunderbird to read, compose, and reply to messages. Email you read here will be marked as read elsewhere. Any change you make, such as moving emails to folders, deleting emails, or otherwise managing your messages, will show up in all the places you access your email.

Since IMAP mirrors the activity on your online account to your PC, it will mirror deletions as well. Delete a message online, and the next time you connect Thunderbird, the message will be deleted locally. Backing up your PC regularly4 provides an additional safety net, since Thunderbird is included in those backups as well.

Backing up contacts

Contacts are not included in the email protocol and thus are not included in anything we’ve done so far. To back up contacts, manually download them from your email provider.

Click on the contacts/people icon on the left of the Outlook.com display online.

If “export” doesn’t show on the menu bar at the top, click on the small down-arrow at the far right of the collapsed ribbon to expose it.

The expanded ribbon should have an “Export contacts” button.

Save the downloaded file somewhere on your computer, ideally in a place that will also be backed up by your regular PC backups.

You can, if you like, import these contacts into Thunderbird, but since our goal here is to back them up, just downloading the file to our computer is enough.5