How can I back up all my Comcast e-mail?

[Craig234]

I'm considering replacing Comcast Cable Modem service with AT&T DSL (reasons include disapproval of Comcast's behavior in paying people to fill a public hearing to block the public, price, and that my Comcast service appears to be slow, going by web reports). One problem - years of e-mail built up in my Comcast account I don't want to lose.

Literally thousands of e-mails, I don't want to go through and try to manually cut and paste or forward. I want to back it up somehow (or mass forward to another address). Any ideas?

 

[g8wayrebel]

What mail system do you use?
Get a gmail account , install the firefox plug in or other third party app and use the gmail as storage??
With either , you can drag and drop into gmail and you have 6G of storage with redundancy on the server.
No matter what you manage to do for this , get gmail so your email isn't on a company server or your machine
to be lost in case of ISP change or system crash.

 

[raincityboy]

Set up a email client on your system to download the mail?
Like outlook, or outlook express.

 

[Craig234]

OK, I have a gmail account already, and I have outlook express. I use firefox as well. Turns out I'd years ago set up Outlook Express to download the mail (good news), so now 3000 messages are there.

That's the most important thing, but if I wanted to put them back in, say, Google mail, I have no idea how to do that.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: Craig234
OK, I have a gmail account already, and I have outlook express. I use firefox as well. Turns out I'd years ago set up Outlook Express to download the mail (good news), so now 3000 messages are there.

That's the most important thing, but if I wanted to put them back in, say, Google mail, I have no idea how to do that.

I'm not sure you can, short of forwarding all the messages to your Gmail account. If you're just looking for offsite backup, you could zip them up and send it to your Gmail account as an attachment.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: lxskllr

Originally posted by: Craig234
OK, I have a gmail account already, and I have outlook express. I use firefox as well. Turns out I'd years ago set up Outlook Express to download the mail (good news), so now 3000 messages are there.

That's the most important thing, but if I wanted to put them back in, say, Google mail, I have no idea how to do that.

I'm not sure you can, short of forwarding all the messages to your Gmail account. If you're just looking for offsite backup, you could zip them up and send it to your Gmail account as an attachment.

Edit:
I switched to Thunderbird a few years ago so I wouldn't be tied to closed source software for my email reader. I figure worst case situation, if Thunderbird didn't support my old email after a few years or something, I could always download an old version, or pay someone to write a conversion program so I could always access my mail. You may want to give that some consideration.


Edit2:

Doh!! I meant to edit my previous message :^/

 

[corkyg]

If you are using Outlook Express, a change in ISPs does not change where the program stores your mail. It will still be there when you switch, and it will continue to store it in the same place.

In OE, click on Tools, Options, and Maintenence. Then go to the STORE radio button. That is where all your mail is in a data base format. It can be easily moved anywhere you want it - even to an external drive.