I have found a useful and free method to back up all my emails from Gmail to Evernote. There is a chance this method will work on most webmail accounts but I haven’t tried them to offer a recommendation.

To do this you will need your gmail account and an Evernote account. Depending on the volume of emails you receive and send you may need the premium version.

For this to work you will need to know your Evernote email address. You can find it in your account settings. It should look something like xxx.xx.x@m.evernote.com.

1. Back up incoming emails

In Gmail go to >> Settings >> Forwarding and Pop/Imap  – then select ‘forward a copy of your incoming mail’ – input your evernote email address and save changes. I suggest you leave a copy of the email on gmail so you can read it as usual.

Once you have done this, all future emails will be sent directly to your Evernote account, ready for your next visit.

2. Back up outgoing emails

I have yet to find an automated method for doing this but a simple BCC: to your Evernote email address on each email sent will ensure you back up the outgoing email as well as the incoming emails.

Flaws

This solution is a little heath robinson but works nicely if you want a simple method for backups. It is not perfect for a number of reasons, perhaps you have other ideas of how to improve this..

i. Knowing how email conversations can be threaded, there is a strong chance of high content repetition if every incoming and outgoing email is backed up.

ii. All the emails will be sent to the default notebook on your evernote account – unless you set your default notebook to email backups you will need to organise them in evernote as you go along.

iii. No auto categorisation – on from point ii, there is no method to ‘tag’ your emails so they can be filtered into a specific notebook. Tagging would greatly help the management of multiple email account backups.

iv. This method works on all emails moving forward, I have yet to work out how to do it for the existing inbox/old emails.

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This is just a little workaround I thought I would share – have you tried this or similar? Do you have any tips worth sharing?

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The summer has been a busy one. I’m still here – still active on Twitter, still active on Friendfeed - see you there maybe?

John Cleese is now appearing on my website and I am delighted to have him here. John, who has recently been in hospital has just sent his latest Nigerian Lottery email talking about all the things he is up to. As part of that he has widgetised some of his old commercials (Accurist, Schweppes) which can be played on any site (you can find them on John’s site). You can see them on the right below my friendfeed bar (double click the play button to make it work.) As a young nipper I hadn’t seen many of his adverts so it was a pleasure to find them here without endless trawling on You Tube.

John has always been at the forefront of these digital channels including a large twitter following and a global Q&A with Seesmic. With Seesmic, John answered questions posed to him by Seesmic users one day last Autumn. I was particularly delighted that he responded to my daughter which made my day and gave my daughter a huge story to tell at school, after she’d explained what seesmic was!