Combining Mail Forward And Filters For Ultimate e-Mail Backup
Written by Anurag Bhateja on April 25, 2009 – 12:17 am -E-mails, no doubt are becoming very important part of our life day by day. We are using e-mails for professional as well as personal purpose. Many of the internet users, if have their own domain and hosting, prefer to use self-hosted mail system. The mails are delivered on servers and then moved to pop3 mail clients like outlook. Some of them also use the server mailing system for mail storage and for sending and reading mails. They do not download mails anywhere.
Sometimes some horrible situations occur for those who use the self-hosted mailing system. Such situation may result in loss of entire mail data from the server. In such situations creating a strong mail backup system with help of Mail Forwarding and Filters on backup mail client is the best solution.
For mail backup system I shall strongly recommend Yahoo Mail because of two reasons, first it has unlimited storage space and second is that in yahoo mail you can filter mails to go in specific folders as soon as they are delivered to the mail account. Another thing which I shall say is that you should not use your primary yahoo mail account for getting backups of your mails and make a new one for that. This will help you keep mails sorted and this will not make your primary yahoo mail account messy.
First step to make the server mail account to forward a copy of your mail to specific mail ID, login into your control panel. On assuming you are using the most popular cpanel for managing your hosting account, please follow the following steps.
1. Go to cpanel and login.
2. Find “Forwarders” under Mail and click on it.
3. Click on “Add Forwarder”. If there are no forwarders added, you see the line “There are no forwarders configured for the current domain.”
4. Now choose the mail address which you want to backup and write the mail ID on which you want the backup.
5. Click on “Add Forwarder”.’
Now you may close the cpanel and move to the yahoo mail account.
1. Click on options from right top.
2. Click on filters and then click on “Create or Edit Filters”. You can create up to 100 filters in free yahoo mail account.
3. Now a new tab/window will open. Click on add button in it.
4. On the next page you will find some fields. Give a name to the filter say “yourmailid@yourdomain.com” e.g. “me@anuragbhateja.com” or just any name you want.
5. In “To” Section write the full mail ID i.e. yourmailid@yourdomain.com.
6. Choose the folder in which you want the mail to be sorted. If you have not created a folder yet, choose new folder. When you click on “Add Filter” button it will ask name for the new folder.
You are done!
Do remember to check this backup mail account once in a week so that you avoid any possibilities of suspension of your yahoo mail account. Although it takes three months on non activity but it is always better to be on safer side.
Now every time a mail is delivered on your self-hosted mail server, a copy will be sent by the server to this yahoo mail account and the yahoo mail account will sort it in the specific folder. You can create 100 mail account backups in free mail account as you can make 100 filters 
. For another mail account backup just follow the steps again.
Tags: cpanel, create email backups with yahoo mail, email, how to backup emails, Linux servers, mail backup, mail forwards, outlook, pop3, self hosted mail system, yahoo mail folders
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