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(Unverified)Apr 4th 2008 12:06PM

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It's getting to be a good idea to "archive" all your inbound and outbound mail to a separately hosted mail account. That way, regardless of what happens at your mail provider, you'll be able to find and optionally reconstruct your entire mail tree. Most e-mail hosts (including Google) and many e-mail clients allow you forward and/or bcc: copies to another e-mail address.

One problem with this is of course...storage size. Dumping all your mail, both in and outbound will generate a huge pile of data.

One way to do this cheaply, is to host your own server. But having an open SMTP server on your home network may be impossible, as ISP's often disallow port 25 traffic to subscriber's IPs. And many SMTP senders won't send mail to hosts using dynamic IPs.

The work-around here is fairly simple.

Send the mail to a reputable (but different) host, such as one at your own ISP, or a free-bee such as Google who offers POP retrieval.

Then on a system located at home, set up any e-mail client such as Outlook Express or Thunderbird to run at startup, and retrieve your archive from this account every 60 minutes using the POP3 protocol.

Periodically burn the messages to CDs or DVDs, and voila, you've got a home-brew e-mail archive system that can keep eliminate some of your fears.

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