Email, or electronic mail, has changed the way people communicate in the past few years and is the most widely mode of communication used today. It helps in communication by exchanging digital messages across computer networks through the internet. An email has two parts: the header, which contains information such as sender, receiver, subject etc and the body, which contains the message itself. Since these emails contain a lot of important information in them, you must know how to save e-mails.
There are many ways in which you can save your emails. You can save them in a flash drive or a disk or you can save them directly in Outlook Express. You can also create a backup of your old Outlook emails on the hard disk drive or an external drive. This article will give you details on each of these methods.
Backup Outlook email manually
- Open Outlook Express and click on the File button at the top of your screen.
- Move your cursor to the “Import and Export” button and click on “Outlook”.
- Select the option “Export to a file” from the drop-down list and click on “Next”.
- Now, choose the “Personal Folder File (.pst)” and click on “Next”.
- Now, select the folder that contains the emails you want to backup and check the box named “Include Subfolders”. Click on “Next” button.
- In the “Save exported files as” box, type in the name and location of the backup file that you have exported. You can also “Browse” for a location on your computer.
- For previous email backups, click on “Options”. You can choose between three options here:
“Allow duplicate items to be created”, “Replace duplicates with items created” and “Do not export duplicate items”. Choose the option which suits your needs and then click on “Finish”.
Automatic backup of files
- Visit Microsoft’s website for downloading the automatic backup tool.
- Under the heading “Destinations & Folders” click on “Download Centre” to go to the download page.
- You will find a box next to “Search all downloads” where you will need to type “Personal file backup”.
- Click on the option “Outlook 2003/2002 Add-in: Personal Folders Backup”.
- Click on the “Continue” button after going through all the information and download the add-in.
- Save the downloaded “Pfbackup.exe” to your computer’s hard disk and open it to follow the instructions for automatic backup.
If you want to back-up and save you emails from Outlook Express, you can follow these simple steps:
- Open Outlook Express and click on “Tools” and select “Options” from the drop-down.
- Click the “Maintenance” button and select “Store Folder”. Now, highlight the folder location and copy it by performing a right-click and selecting copy or by pressing CTRL and C keys on your keyboard together.
- Click on the “Cancel” button to close all the opened boxes.
- Click on the Start menu and select Run. In the pop-up box, paste the location of the folder you copied in the previous step and click OK.
- Now, you will get a window that will have a database of your emails saved in .dbx format.
- Now, click on the “Edit” button and then click “Select All” from the drop down. Again click on “Edit” and then select “Copy” from the drop down.
- Go to the start menu again, click on All Programs, then Accessories and then on Windows Explorer.
- In the Windows Explorer window click on the “File” button and select New and then Folder option. This will create a new folder and you can rename it.
- Open this new folder that you have created and click on Edit and then Paste option. Your email messages have been saved here now. You can either copy them to a CD or transfer them another PC.
You can also save your emails in a USB drive. This will allow you to read the saved email messages even when you are offline. Follow these simple steps:
- Sign into your email account by typing your user id and password in the required fields and open the email that has to be saved.
- Click on the “Print Screen” button, open the word processing program and open a new document.
- Now, press CTRL and V keys together on your keyboard and an image of your email will be pasted in the new document.
- Save this document by clicking on the File button and selecting save option.
- Now, attach the USB drive to your PC and open the folder to view files in it.
- Now, open the folder where you saved the email. Click on the file and drag it to the window of the USB drive.
- The time taken to copy the file will depend on the size of the email and the attachments with it.
- You will notice a “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the lower-right side of your system tray. Click on it and select USB flash drive from the options and take out the USB.
Related Content: