I recently bumped up against the storage limit on my nearly 20-year-old Gmail account. An account that I maintain out of habit more than anything, preferring to use a personal domain for sending newsletters and emails. And considering everything Google has been up to recently, I’d rather not have a Gmail account at all, but getting rid of it is agonizing.
My inbox archives contain everything from undergrad memories to extended family members reaching out about the birth of my daughter. The only option to preserve everything while winding down my account (or keeping it but minimizing its footprint) is to back up Gmail to an external drive before saying goodbye. As an added bonus, it should protect my archives from future platform outages, shutdowns, AI training, storage limits, and whatever other tech dystopias are on the horizon. And while I’m at it, I might as well revisit how I make backups of my newsletter and its list.
Email and newsletter backups are kind of weird, though. An image or a video is a single, self-contained file that you can dump into a folder and walk away. Emails, with their headers, embedded media, and metadata, require more forethought to back up properly.
What local email and newsletter backups look like
Emails are, essentially, just text files with some narrowly defined and standardized formatting included at the beginning. Those headers in the opening lines are where you’ll find the metadata that email clients use to organize your inbox: who sent the message, which address received it and when, a plaintext subject line, the works. Anything below the headers could be plain text or, as is more common today, basic HTML with images and buttons.
Depending on where you’re backing up emails from (e.g. your inbox vs your newsletter platform) and how you approach it, you’ll usually end up with an .eml file for individual messages, a single .mbox file for all the emails in a folder or inbox, or .html or .md files for newsletters you sent from an app like Buttondown or Substack.
There are any number of things you can do with these files. You might want to export an .eml or .mbox file to delete messages from your Gmail account and free up storage space, importing the backups into a client where you could still see them in search and archives. Or maybe you want to permanently close down an account while still having access to its history when drafting and sending from a new email address.
As a newsletter sender, saving copies of past issues is probably about posterity and redundancy, preventing a situation where a platform outage or shutdown cuts off access to everything you’ve created. In that case, you’ll be working with .html and .md files, which are better for importing past issues into another newsletter platform or publishing your archives to your personal website.
Whatever approach you take, there are options to create backups automatically or manually, in bulk or one email at a time, with pros and cons for each approach.
Backing up your entire email history
If you want to back up everything, from your inbox to sent emails and archives, your options fall into essentially two categories. You can either use standardized protocols to sync messages automatically in the background or manually export your entire history as a single archived file.
Automatic backups to a local drive
Reading your email in a desktop email client almost guarantees that incoming emails are saved locally thanks to standardized protocols like IMAP or POP3. But where messages are saved and how frequently they are synced to your computer are both things that will be specific to the client you use. Those details are essential to understanding before creating copies you can store somewhere safe.
The IMAP protocol mirrors anything that happens on your email server to your local storage. When you delete an email in a Gmail.com browser tab, it will be deleted on your computer as well. If this is your protocol of choice for local backups, make sure you’re syncing all of your account’s folders before transferring those backups to another drive or location. Most clients have directionally similar settings and in Thunderbird, for example, you go to the Synchronization & Storage settings, check that "Keep messages for this account on this computer" is enabled, and confirm that all the folders are checked under the Advanced menu.
POP3, on the other hand, downloads messages to local storage and usually deletes those emails from your server, making it far better for privacy and account storage limits. Going the POP3 route means you need backups stored on at least one (ideally two) drives other than your computer, since they won’t be duplicated on your email server.
The main benefit of automatic backups via IMAP or POP3 is that if your email provider disappeared tomorrow, you’d still have access to your emails. Where these protocols fall a bit short, at least without other precautions in place, is that your computer is potentially just another point of failure. That’s why, every few months, I spend 20 minutes copying my most recent emails to a drive that isn’t connected to my computer or email service at all times.
Bulk manual exports for your entire email history
There’s something reassuring about clicking an export or download button, though, seeing files appear so soon after you requested them. In a client like Apple Mail, exports are as easy as right-clicking anything below the On My Mac label and selecting Export Mailbox to create an .mbox file that could be imported back in if something gets corrupted on your computer. There are a few more steps to accomplish the same thing with a webmail account but it’s just as easy.
With Gmail, for instance, you go to takeout.google.com, select a Mail export, and follow the prompts to get an .mbox file for all your emails (attachments are included in mbox archives too, for what it’s worth) and a .json file for all your user settings. Save those files somewhere safe and you’re all set! When you want to import an archive from Gmail or another provider into a desktop email client, it’s usually as simple as selecting Import from the file menu (although some, like Thunderbird, are easier to manage with an add-on tool). After that, imported emails will live in the Local Folders section (or On My Mac in Apple Mail) and the headers and message content will be searchable in the same way as emails for a connected account.
Backing up your sent newsletters and subscriber list
Sending an email to dozens, possibly hundreds or thousands, of recipients is not the same thing as sending an email to a few of your friends. You need to go through a platform that takes care of all the deliverability speedbumps that inbox providers have created to curtail spam. So, when you need to create copies of emails you sent to a list, you’ll have to go through your sending platform rather than your email account provider.
In Buttondown, you can export your archive of sent issues from the Emails tab by clicking the three horizontal dots and selecting Export. You’ll get a markdown file for each past issue alongside a single CSV or JSON file (your choice of which) with metadata for each issue. It’s usually better to use the templated Weekly Export automation, though. Or build something a little more personalized by exporting via the API. Swap the Emails tab for the Subscribers tab and the steps to download your subscriber list are essentially the same. These steps tend to be fairly uniform across newsletter platforms. Substack’s exports are under Publication Settings > Import/Export, for instance, and give you HTML files instead of markdown.
The big difference between exporting your "regular" email archives and newsletters you sent to your list is that the latter does not include headers in the HTML or markdown files, so there’s no clean way for an email client to organize them. A website content management system like WordPress wouldn’t have any trouble bulk importing past issues as blog posts, however. But even if all you do is put your archives on an external hard drive, you’re preventing all your writing from disappearing into a black hole when an Amazon outage takes down half the internet.
The only thing that can get mildly complicated about newsletter backups is media exports. Images included in your newsletters usually show up as links in the markdown or HTML files, pointing to wherever the platform is hosting them, such as https://assets.buttondown.email/images/[imageID].png in the case of Buttondown. If you’re an artist or designer, you almost certainly have those images stored in plenty of redundant and safe places. For media that you didn’t think to back up when you created it, though, losing your work to link rot is terrifying.
Buttondown has a somewhat unique API parameter for exporting all your newsletter images in a .zip file. But anyone who’s unfamiliar with how to make an API call or on another newsletter platform will need to find another way to back up those images. Personally, I’ve made it a habit to snapshot my newsletter issues, including their images, in the Wayback Machine immediately after I publish them. It’s manual instead of automatic and one-at-a-time instead of in bulk. But sometimes that’s the best approach!
In fact, some people prefer backing up individual newsletter issues because it makes it easier to categorize or organize them case by case. One of the simplest options, in either a browser or an email client, is Print to PDF (in the Print menu, in case that wasn’t clear). This approach is great because what you see is what you get, giving you a backup of embedded images as they appear on the page.
Another option is the Share button to send the text of a newsletter issue to an app like Instapaper, Obsidian, or Notion. That way you could link to it or embed it in your own personal wiki or knowledge base. And when the Share button doesn’t work reliably for your use case, or if images and formatting don’t always transfer cleanly, most notes and read-it-later apps have browser extensions to clip webpages and newsletters.
Finally, you could simply save emails as .eml files, one-at-a-time whenever the need arises. While not the most efficient approach, it would let you filter what does and does not get backed up with more granularity. And assuming you save your .eml files to a local folder that automatically syncs files to a service like OneDrive or Dropbox, you cover your bases in terms of having the files stored in multiple locations.
Your emails, forever
Emails are one of the few bastions of digital portability and optionality left to us. But they are not really yours until they live somewhere that only you control. Your messages and newsletters are just as trapped as other walled-garden content if you don’t have local copies and backups.
By exporting my Gmail .mbox file, I could set up an auto-forwarding rule to send all incoming messages to my new address and create an autoresponder to let people know the Gmail address will be shutting down in the next six months to a year. Or, if that doesn’t go well, I can keep the account running and delete everything in the archive to free up space, still able to search the entire history in my desktop client. And in case I need to move my newsletter to another platform, I’m saving backups monthly to my laptop, an external drive, and in the Wayback Machine.
My content is actually mine. And that’s rare nowadays. Don’t take it for granted.
Image credits
| Image | Credit |
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| Header photo | By Lianhao Qu, via Unsplash |