Easiest Way to Backup GMail Data

I am damn sure that GMail freaks (like me) will adore this post! I have always tried different ways to backup the data in my GMail account, since it is my primary email account. I had tried configuring Microsoft outlook and Outlook Express for GMail, so that I can download those important mails to my PC. But they turned out to be pretty slow.

But now, Jan Švec & Filip Jurčíček have developed a small utility called Gmail-Backup which can be used to backup and archive GMail account in a single click. It basically uses the IMAP feature in Gmail to save and restore the complete archives.

The messages are stored in the local directory in files which names follow the format YYYYMMDD-hhmmss-nn.eml where YYYY is the year, MM the month number, DD is the day number, hh are hours, mm are minutes and ss are seconds when the e-mail was SENT. Label assignment is stored in the file labels.txt which is the plain text file and it pairs the emails stored in the file described above with the assigned labels.
It is really a very simple tool to use. After installing, just enter your GMail username and password, select the folder for storing backup and then click the backup button. That is it! you are done!!
Download GMail-backup