How to backup folder locally
 

I’ve spent a great deal of time on this before giving up. I’m in a legal dispute with somebody, and have put all our email correspondence in a new folder. A couple of times, when I logged back on to Fastmail, the folder had disappeared completely! I nearly had a heart attack. And the messages weren’t back where they’d come from either.

It seems to be back again – for now – but as you can imagine, I am very worried about the possibility of losing my crucial data. I searched in vain within Fastmail for any way of downloading them to a local backup; then looked on various forums etc, where people recommended various utilities. I tried a couple of them (I THINK IMAPsize was one of them, but they couldn’t communicate with your servers.

So I installed Thunderbird, and tried that – it couldn't either. Eventually, I was desperate enough to try something by Microsoft (Outlook 2010), so followed your instructions VERY carefully – Outlook couldn’t talk to your servers either. I tried this 3 times, laboriously slowly, making sure there wasn’t any tiny detail I’d missed. No go.

How can I back my data up please?
Thanks

The reason the folder had disappeared could simply have been a browser peculiarity involving temporary internet files. If after you log out of Fastmail you clear your browsers cache, the folder should appear since you're loading a 'fresh' copy of the page/site. Of course, ensure you also click 'Save Changes' after you create a folder.

I've personally used both IMAPSize and Thunderbird in the past to do exactly what you're attempting. Are you running a server yourself or do you pay for shared hosting which has administrators? For all three methods to fail, are you sure the IMAP settings, ports, etc., you're using are correct?

Have you tried using, eg: IMAPSize with your firewall temporarily disabled in case that is preventing the communication between the third-party software and your email server?

There is actually a way provided by Fastmail to download the messages of a folde as a zip file. In the current interface, it is rather well hidden. Go to Settings => Folders and click on Advanced (top right). Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Purge//Download//Remove duplicates.... The page that appears allows you to select a folder and one of the options is to download the contents of the folder as a zip file.

I've never had any problems with clients connecting to Fastmail: Outlook 2003, Outlook Express, Win Live Mail, IMAPsize. That was before SSL/TLS was mandatory.

I always use copy/paste for the server name, and keep it in a note on Android.

I KNEW I'd done that years ago - that's one of the reasons I was so frustrated, as I couldn't find how to do it any more!

Thank you :D

PS and thanks so much to all the others who tried to help too - but I've decided to take the easy way out this time!

Saving Fastmail.fm files to a local Outlook.pst file
 

Will the system described in this post work to select folders or emails to be saved locally to an Outlook pst file, or some other file which could be opened if needed?
RoyRetreat

I would not recommend loading the files into a proprietary format like an Outlook PST file.

The zip file I suggested could be downloaded has individual files in an EML format. These can be opened in many different ways (for instance, Windows Live Mail or Outlook Express). I find this convenient when I want to send an archive of emails to someone else.

For personal backup/archive of emails, I use an old program called IMAPsize. This can download and store files as either EML or MBX (another common format).