How to backup email messages to local folders?

In most of the times, your mailbox quota exceeded is because you have accumunated too many email messages in your inbox and/or in the email folders. Sometimes unexpectedly large email messages (usually with attachments) delivered to your inbox also causes the problem.

In both cases, deleting obsoleted email messages from your inbox and email folders is the vital solution. But if you find that most of your email messages are useful for you, you may consider saving them to your local harddisk as a backup, and then delete the messages from the email server.

But first of all, how can I know my Mailbox Usage?

    You can login to HKUST iMail Service: Personal Setting to find out the quota usage of your mailbox for iMail user.

Now, how can I backup my email messages to my local PC if I am using PC-Pine?

  1. From your PC, use the Windows Explorer to create a folder c:\mail. You can actully name it as whatever you like.

  2. Start PC-Pine, type the commands "s"(setup) and then "c" (config) from the PC-Pine MAIN MENU.

  3. In the SETUP CONFIGURATION screen, you may see the folder-collections parameter looks like one of the following: 
       folder-collections       = {imap.ust.hk}mail/[]      
                        or
   folder-collections       = {uxmail.ust.hk}mail/[]
  4. Modify the parameter to make it looks like the following: 
       folder-collections       = {imap.ust.hk}mail/[], Local_Folder c:\mail\[]
                        or
   folder-collections       = {uxmail.ust.hk}mail/[], Local_Folder c:\mail\[]

  5. Type "e"(exit) to exit the SETUP CONFIGURATION screen and type "y"(yes) to confirm the modification when prompted.

  6. Quit PC-Pine and then restart it.

  7. From the MAIN MENU, type "l"(folder list) to enter the FOLDER LIST screen. You should see an extra section : 
       Folder-collection Local_Folder
    at the bottom of the screen.

  8. Now you can freely save messages to this folder collection. Emails saved in this folder collection will only taking up space in your local hard disk and it will not affect your mailbox quota.

What if I use Netscape Messenger?

It is even easier to accomplish this if you are using Netscape Messenger.
  1. Start Netscape Messenger, you should see a section named Local Mail on the left folder list panel. (If you are using Netscape Messenger version 4.0X, you should see that in the Messenger Center instead.)

  2. All the folders created under this section are locally stored on your PC. Therefore, you are free to create folders in this section and save your large messages in here. In the following example, we named the folder as BackupMail