The “Mail” app from Apple is great. But it does lake a feature : Automatic backup of all email accounts WITH the emails. One could say that “Time Machine” does the job, but you cannot set it up to only backup Mail ! I am a freak and often had bad experience to recover my data that got copied, partly because of the app and partly because my Hard Drive went on fire (Yes ! It was a PC). So now I say “Always have two copies of everything” !

I have Time Machine that backup my whole system, Personal Backup X5 to backup specific folders, and now “Email Backup Pro” for “Mail” ! I do have to mention that it also works for other email clients such as Microsoft Entourage and Thunderbird. I only mention Mail because this what I use daily and tested on.

Email Backup Pro does exactly what it says on the tin : it backups your emails, in a easy to use interface with only the features you need. You choose your email client you want to backup, then you choose the destination where you want your backup to be. You can then backup whenever you want by manually activating it or by asking the app to do it at specific days and times, automatically. So you can forget about it while it is doing it in the background.

What the app does, it creates one backup file of all your email accounts with the emails, and then archive it in the destination folder you specified. Then you can browse your archives and restore the file, all within Email Backup Pro (and only within because it copied all emails in one Email Backup Pro file, that is then stored your specified folder).

The interface looks somehow old style and is not really “eye candy” (it is more like “old aqua” on older Mac OS X). But it is very straightforward and simple to use. At the same time, it does not really matter how it looks because once setup, you will not see it very often.

And there is, nevertheless, some bad sides to the app : First of all, when doing the backups, it has to quit Mail in order to continue, and that is a pity because I feel it disturbs my work. Already mentioned above, it has to create a proprietary file to store your emails in, so you cannot browse your folder like in Time Machine. And at last, the User Interface is not great looking on the latest Macs running Leopard but at least it is clear and simple.

Conclusion, Email Backup Pro is the best app I ever used in order to backup my emails. I now have used it for a while, and even needed to restore some emails… bref, it works like a charm !

You can get Email Backup Pro from Squashed Software. Go and grab a copy !