How To Backup Your Gmail with a Free Windows Live Account

Recently a small number of Gmail users found that all of their email and folders were missing. While Google still works on fixing the problem, let’s take a look at how you can backup your Gmail account with a free Windows Live Mail Hotmail account.

1. The first thing you’ll need to do is sign into your most important Gmail account(s). Click on the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner then click Account Settings.

2. Click on Gmail Settings.

3. Click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab and click to enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded) this will ensure you have everything that’s in your Gmail Inbox.

4. Make sure to save your settings.

5. Now head over to the Windows Live Mail site and start an account if you don’t have one already, or use an existing one. For this tutorial, we’ll set up a new account and name it something like “GmailBackupxxx@live.com” …or anything that’s available and helps you remember what the account is for.

Make sure to verify your new account by clicking the link Live Mail sends you.

6. After signing up for a new Windows Live Hotmail email account, go to your inbox and click Options >> More options.

7. Then in Hotmail Options under Managing your account click on Sending/receiving email from other accounts.

8. Then click Add an email account.

9. Enter in your Gmail account credentials and click Next.

10. Now select to add the Gmail messages from your Inbox or a separate folder. In this instance we selected to add it to a folder and named it Gmail Backup…click Save.

11. Now you will have all of your Gmail backed up to Windows Live Mail for free.

After setting Live Mail to retrieve emails from Gmail, walk away if you have a ton of mail…it will take a long time for it to populate. There are other ways to back up your Gmail with online services like Backupify or locally to your hard drive using an email client like Thunderbird.

There are several ways to backup your email if the mighty Gmail goes down. What method do you use? Leave a comment and let us know!