As far as i have seen there is no real Backup for Email Accounts.
Let’s say i migrate from one Email provider to another one and want to take my emails with me. If i create a backup with EmClient it will not allow to import the former concent of the mailbox to the new Account. A EmClient Backup is only a snapshot of the Emails right now, and impoting this this snapshot would also delete newer emails that arrrived in the inbox after the snapshot has been taken.
So what i would be looking for is a feature where you would simply rightclick on an account to back it up and you get a compressed file containing all your folders and emails of this account.
When you want to move them to another account you would simply rightclick on the other account say import backup and it would add the folder structure and emails to this account, without deleting the existing emails.
Yes, the eM Client backup is a snapshot of the database at the time it is made. You use it later to restore eM Client to that same condition.
While cached content from your server is included, as soon as the restore is complete, the accounts will immediately revert to what is on the server. That is because with IMAP and Exchange, the message store is on the server, not the client.
If you want to migrate from one provider to another, while you still have access to the old one, copy the synced content to Local Folders. If Local Folders are not visible below your other folders, you can enable them by selecting Menu > Settings > General > General > Show Local Folders. Click on Save & Close to save the setting.
Then remove the account from eM Client and setup with the new provider. You can then move that Local Folder data to the new account folders, so it uploads to the server.
Thats exactely what i did. But if you have an mailbox with many subfolders, things get complicated and might take a long time to copy too. To copy some messages from an old to a new mailbox, that might be a good enough approach, but from a safety and backup perspective, there should be possible to export and import whole mailboxes into a different one.
example: employee leaves. existing emails need to be transferred to new employee. A simple backup and restore to a folder inside the new mailbox wouldnt take much time and since you dont need to focus on the details, hence you cant miss something when there is a backup function.
so the new mailbox would change from:
inbox
sent
deleted
to
inbox
sent
deleted
old employee accountname
inbox
sent
deleted
This would already help a lot. From there proper cleaning / integration of the datasets can be done manually, but it would be important to get a FULL MAILBOX BACKUP somehow and be able to integrate it in another mailaccount.
I am interested in knowing if you manage to find a satisfactory solution. I simple backup of an entire account with its tree structure strikes me as a no brainer.
Also apart from copying account messages and message folders to Local Folders or exporting messages to .eml as @gary already advised, if you have eM Client V10, you can also go to “Menu / Data Files” and create a data file (.emdf) which resides outside of eM Client which by default goes in your “Documents / eM Client” folder.
Then once created, it will appear under your mail accounts on the left. You can then copy any account messages and any custom account folders etc into a folder called eg: Old Mail or Old Account mail under that data file as a backup.
Then once they are all under Old Mail or Old account mail, then you can either leave it there permanently, or you can unmount it if you don’t need those messages atm. You can then re-mount that anytime later when required.