Welcome to the latest installment of our monthly Q&A column, where a panel of experts answers your questions about using technology in your law practice.
This month, we answer readers’ questions about how to back up your email and how to delete those annoying horizontal lines in MS Word and Outlook.
Q: How Do I Back Up My Emails?
How can I protect my personal emails from loss due to a data breach or a failure by my email service provider?
A: You can protect your emails with software you purchase once or with a subscription to a cloud backup service.
While most everyone backs up the files on their computers, it is unusual for people to back up their emails. After all, don’t Microsoft and Google back up everything more reliably than you can?
Yes, but . . .
Although Microsoft Outlook and Gmail emails are backed up multiple times by these big tech companies, you still can lose precious emails. How?
- You might accidentally delete an important email. Typically, all your deleted messages are permanently deleted after 30 days.
- You might intentionally delete an email that, in hindsight, you wish you’d kept.
- You might “clean house” after being overwhelmed with years of emails. That can lead to: “If only I had that one old email!”
- Hackers could compromise your email account and delete everything in an effort to cover their tracks.
- Your provider could shut down your account for a suspected rules violation. How long will it take to fix that?
- Your account and all the backups could be accidentally deleted by Google or Microsoft. Think that couldn’t happen? It did to the retirement accounts of 647,000 UniSuper customers. Google accidentally deleted all their accounts and all Google’s backups.
What if one of these failures happened to you, and you needed an old email? Maybe to prove that you actually did tell someone something or to find some vital information? That’s when you need your own email backups.
Either a specialized software program or a cloud service subscription can continually back up all your emails.
Email Backup Software
After trying a number of programs, my favorite is Mail Backup X - Personal Edition, currently a $59 one-time purchase. Its license does not restrict you from using it for business accounts. This edition supports backups of up to five separate accounts, including:
- Gmail and Google Workspace
- Microsoft Outlook, Outlook.com, and Microsoft 365
- Apple Mail
- Microsoft Exchange
- Mozilla Thunderbird, Yahoo, AOL
- Any IMAP-based email service
Mail Backup X costs more than the other software programs I have tried (see below), but I prefer it because of its options and lightning-fast search capabilities. When you have a large, old collection of emails in your backup, it is great to be able to run a flexible search and get fast results.
Another important capability is backing up all emails older than a selected date and then removing them from your email account. Mail Backup X can do that.
Below are other email backup programs I tried (but did not like as much as Mail Backup X):
A downside of using email backup software is that backups are stored on your PC, where they are more vulnerable than backups stored in the cloud. You can protect your email backups by backing up their files to the cloud or a drive you keep offsite for safety.
Email Backup Subscription Services
Email backup subscriptions can back up your emails directly to the vendors’ cloud storage.
- CloudAlly ($3 per month per mailbox). Backs up Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
- BDRSuite (free). Backs up Google Workspace for up to ten users for free—forever.
In a work setting, you have more to think about in terms of archiving and purging old emails. But for your personal emails, it is wise and inexpensive to back up everything.
Techie: Wells H. Anderson, JD, GPSolo eReport Contributing Technology Editor and CEO of SecureMyFirm, can be reached at 952/922-1120 or through www.securemyfirm.com. Their focus is on protecting small firms from cyber threats with affordable, multiple layers of defense.