Open Webmail Help Tutorials >> Downloading & Backing up

Backup is data that has been copied to another location for safe-keeping. You should do this with all of the important files and folders on your computer periodically, in case of unexpected problems that may occur.

You are given only a certain amount of space to store all of your files on your account, including your Open Webmail e-mail messages. Because of this, you may eventually run out of space (if you are reaching the maximum amount of space that you are allotted, you will receive an e-mail telling you so). This may require you to remove messages from Open Webmail. However, you may have important messages that you want to keep for future reference. You can download your e-mail messages onto your computer and view them at any time with any text editor you have.

To Download an E-mail Folder:

You can download your e-mail messages from an Open Webmail folder onto your computer with the folder manager (click the toolbar button). When you are in the folder manager, you can click the disk icon ( ), by the folder you wish to download. It will then start to download to your computer. You will be asked whether you want to save or open file. When asked so, select the "Save..." option. It will then pop up a file browser. Browse to the folder on your computer where you wish to save it, and click "Save".

The files are saved in a .zip format.* A .zip file contains a file or several files that have been compressed into one file. You will need a file compression/decompression utility to open these files. The following is a list of programs that you can use to compress and decompress .zip files (note that these are in no way associated with Open Webmail):

- Winzip
- PicoZip
- Free Zip Program
- ZipWave

To View Your E-mail Messages:

Once you have downloaded the e-mail message folder, you can use one of these programs to decompress the file and read it. You will not be able to double-click the decompressed file to open it. Instead, open a text editor (such as Windows Notepad**), and open it in there by using the Open command in the File menu. The messages from the folder you downloaded will all be there in plain text, along with all of the e-mail headers .

The e-mail messages that you download will, unfortunately, be have lines of computer gibberish that you may not want to trudge through. If you are running out of space to store your e-mail messages in Open Webmail, but would like to keep them there for ease of use, please contact your system administrator to inquire about purchasing more disk space on your user account.

*Note: If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5, you may experience difficulties opening the file after downloading. It may appear to be in a .pl file format. If so, change the .pl to .zip and follow the instructions above.

**Windows Notepad is limited as to how large of a file it can open. If it is too large, you will be asked to open the file in Wordpad. When asked to do so, click "Yes".

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