Lot of people use Gmail as their primary email address. This means that many will have critical mails stored in Gmail servers. What they don’t realize is that Gmail is still in beta. Chances of permanently loosing your mails from Gmail server is very small, but you never know (especially since it is a beta)! So it is better to backup your Gmail mails somewhere.

To backup mails, you can enable auto forwarding in Gmail and then forward all the mails to an alternate account somewhere else (Yahoo, perhaps?). Now what will you do with your existing mails? Obviously forwarding all of them is going to be time consuming.

That is where POP3 support in Gmail comes for rescue. You can enable POP3 access on Gmail account and then download all your mails to a desktop email client (I use Outlook Express). You can then backup the mail file created on a CD.

Step 1 - Enable POP3 on Gmail

Step 2 - Configure your mail client to download from Gmail
Please see this comprehensive configuration settings tutorial from Google. Google has also provided an auto configuration tool for Outlook Express.

Following are the important details about Gmail POP3 access,

• username: [yourgmailid]@googlemail.com
• pop3 server: pop.googlemail.com
• smtp server: smtp.googlemail.com
• smtp port(SSL enabled): 465
• pop3 port(SSL enabled): 995