[credo]

OP says >>We've all (yours truly included) heard about the importance of owning your digital data, the downsides of vendor lock-in, and how if you're being provided a free service, you're the product, not the customer. But I honestly never understood how deep this problem is, and how severe the consequences can be ("surely this cannot happen to me", right?!).

Excellent point.

Btw one easy way to maintain a local copy of all your gmail-emails is to use a mail client (like Outlook or Apple Mail) with gmail. With Outlook, for example, you can easily download and move emails into a PST/OST file on your PC.

[larrys]

"one easy way to maintain a local copy"

The other way is to maintain a non local copy by setting up a forward to another email account elsewhere. That's automatic and doesn't require downloading to your local machine and happens in real time.

[wvenable]

Backing up is fine, but the problem is you still don't own your identity. If your email address is [e-mail] you've lost that forever and that could be a big problem.

[drucken]

Set up your own domain name for $5/year or less and use the free email aliasing that comes with it,

e.g. [e-mail] would be aliased to [e-mail] at your DNS provider.

Then you only ever pass around wvenable.me addresses. If you get a good provider, they will give you unlimited free aliasing (though they may not allow catch-all address for free, which redirect anything@ to some default address, due to spam potential).

Combined with monthly backups via IMAP or export from your actual email providers, you will never be dependent in either identity, contacts or content with any single provider.

Needless to say, all of the above is trivial to setup for a typical HN'er.

[Drbble]

That's a problem anywhere. You have to own your own name or share it with someone you trust for life or just adapt to change like we did before cell phone number portability.

[kaybe]

As long as you still have your adress book you can set up a new account and tell everyone. If you have that adress book, that is.

[prawn]

Which is great unless your PST hits the 2GB mark and corrupts. Has happened to me a few times and it makes for a distressing and wasted period of time. Newer Outlooks are meant to avoid the limit but an upgrade didn't help me last time.

[Ecio78]

Which version are you talkin about? There were a 2GB limit in Outlook Express (the free one shipped with XP and i suppose older ones) for its dbx files: when you reach the 2GB limit, you cant receive (or send) files anymore. It was particularly nasty if it happened on your sent folders, because emails were continously pulled from outgoing, sent to receivers, failed to copy into sent, copied again in outgoing for the next send cycle, so if you didnt intervene you'll have people flooded. Office Outlook (the paid outlook) had not this problem (at least since 2003 to 2010), I manage a network of 100 users circa and we use Outlook for multiple personal and office IMAP accounts, and some of them are way larger than 2GB. Sometimes corruption happens on PST files, but I cant relate it to their dimension.

And, by the way, you can always use Mozilla Thunderbird

[kalleboo]

Microsoft acknowledge that PST files can corrupt when they hit the 2 GB limit in Outlook Standard Edition 97, 98, 2000, 2002:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088: "This problem occurs because the .pst and the .ost files have a 2 gigabyte (GB) size limitation, and the error message occurs when it is exceeded. "

[andreasvc]

Solution: don't use Outlook. Better use e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird.

[prawn]

I don't quite like the way Thunderbird works. I use it for one account, but not my main work. Would love to give up Outlook though.

[prawn]

I don't really pay much attention to version numbers, but first had it with an older version (97 or 02?) then again with 07 it might've been? Whatever I'm using has the Ribbon.

[dredmorbius]

Better: fetchmail and/or offlineimap, stored to a real mail storage format, preferably maildir.

Available on all sane platforms. Linux distros natively, Mac OS X (you might need to go to DarwinPorts for the software), and Windows (via Cygwin).

Note with offlineimap, changes on the server (e.g.: mail deletions) will be reflected on your local archive when re-synched. If your goal is archival, you'll want to copy the local mail you want to save permanently elsewhere.