Today everyone in the business world uses electronic mail. It’s a very fast and free way to communicate between different employees or even with other companies. But as the demand for communication on the Internet has increased, so have the cases of hacking, virus attacks, and other problems with data on the Internet. The best way to protect your important data is to back it up to your computer and not to store it all on the Internet.
Why do you need to make backups
When it comes to emails, they often contain very important information for which you may be required to pay. Or it may simply contain information that cannot be lost in any way. For example, Hotmail, now known as Outlook.com, is still one of the most popular webmail services. It has retained its many millions of users despite the ups and downs.
Hotmail has had cases where users have lost all their data in a second. This has usually been due to hacker attacks. In this case, the only way to help you is to back up your emails to your hard drive beforehand.
While cybercrime is still the main reason to back up your emails, you may also need a copy of your messages to transfer them to another email system.
How to backup Hotmail email folders to hard drive
Microsoft does not have a direct export option for their Hotmail mail. But there is a way that you can save your webmail messages to your local system. To do that you need :
- Log in to your Hotmail account in your browser
- Open the email you want to copy
- Now in the header area, find the down arrow. It’s next to the Reply button
- Here you need to select the View message source option. You can also right click and select the View message source option from the context menu that appears
- In the message source code you will need to do the following:
- For Windows press Ctrl+A to select all the text and then press Ctrl+C to copy the selected code
- For Mac, press Command + A and then Command + C, so you will highlight and copy the source of the message
- Next you need to check if your browser can save the email source code in EML format:
- Go to File > Save As in the email message source tab
- Give your file a name. You should have an .eml extension at the end
- Browsers normally save with a .html or .htm extension. So you will have to double check that the file extension is something like .EML
- Then just click Continue and save the file to any location on your system
- If you cannot create an EML file in your browser, you need to
- After copying the source code, run any text editor, such as Notepad
- Create a new document
- Paste there all copied text
- After that save your document with the extension .eml to any place on your local hard drive
This way you can copy an email to your internal storage. Then you can easily import it back into Hotmail or any other webmail system.
