DreamHost threatening to delete 25 years of my email from their server tonight

[stephen]

Is there an online storage service for sent and received IMAP email?

I’ve seen too many hard drive crashes to completely trust local storage.

I deleted thousands of old messages, but they want them all gone.

All suggestions welcome.

[Ken Sp.]

Could you set up a Gmail account, and have it go retrieve all of your messages for you?

[stephen]

I’ll give it a try.

[clay]

Ken Sp. wrote:
Could you set up a Gmail account, and have it go retrieve all of your messages for you?

Yup, that's one option that should work. There are also programs that will let you take an offline backup of your email and keep it in a format that could be brought back into the email account at some point. I don't have any recommendations as I've never needed this.

[Ken Sp.]

You said you were concerned about storing it locally, but with proper back ups, it might not be an issue. You would set it as a POP account, and have it download all messages to your computer. I still think Gmail, and said it to retrieve your mail for you, would be your best solution. Do a new account, and you will get a full 15 GB of storage before you have to pay.

[Robert M]

Stephen,

You've not backed up your email locally at all over all these years?

You can download the mail in MBOX format and/or use an app like EMail Archiver to downloads the email, convert it to PDF and also save the attachments. No reason not to keep a copy of your mail stored on a local drive. Download it all. Make a backup copy on one or more other drives. There is minimal risk if you using a proper backup strategy.

Why is DeamHost threatening to delete 25 years of email? It seems rather odd to me. Are they discontinuing the service? Cutting the amount of email storage provided to you?

Robert

[mattkime]

Dreamhost posts remind me that dreamhost still exists. Feels like a blast from the past to me.

[vision63]

Definitely back it up locally to beat the deadline while trying the gmail thing too.

[stephen]

They say email archiving is now unacceptable use.

[stephen]

They're going to give me another week.