Archiving Your Emails Before Cancelling an Address

An email address almost always gets cancelled at some point: a change of provider, the end of a work subscription, leaving an employer. The problem isn't the cancellation itself, but the moment you realize, once access is cut off, that you should have kept a copy of a particular message or attachment. Archiving before cancelling avoids this kind of unpleasant surprise, as long as you know what an archive actually contains and for how long it stays available.

Why archive before, not after

Once an email address is cancelled, it's generally impossible to go back: the provider deletes the data from the server, sometimes immediately, sometimes after a delay that isn't always documented or guaranteed. Waiting until the cancellation is effective to remember you needed a specific message leaves you no room to maneuver. The only reliable approach is to make the archive before starting the cancellation process, while the mailbox is still fully accessible over IMAP.

What an archive contains, and what it doesn't

MailSync's mailbox backup tool connects read-only to your mailbox and downloads all of your messages into a .zip archive. Specifically, this archive contains:

• All your messages, one .eml file per message (an open standard, readable by Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail, and most email clients).
• All your attachments, included directly inside each corresponding .eml file.
• The complete tree of your folders, reproduced exactly inside the archive.

On the other hand, the archive does not contain your contacts, your calendar, or any filtering rules or forwarding configured server-side: only messages and their folder organization are backed up. If you depend on these, export them separately before cancellation, in addition to the mail archive.

One reassuring point: the connection is read-only. At no point are your messages deleted, moved, or marked as read on the original server during the backup — your mailbox stays exactly as you left it, which leaves you free to run another backup if needed, before the cancellation takes effect.

The 48-hour window

Once the backup is finished, the .zip archive stays available for download for 48 hours, then it's permanently deleted from our servers. This window is deliberately short: MailSync doesn't keep mail archives beyond what's needed to give you time to retrieve them. In practice, this means you need to:

1. Start the backup early enough before the planned cancellation date, not the night before.
2. Download the archive as soon as it's ready, rather than counting on it staying on our servers indefinitely.
3. Store it yourself afterwards, on a drive or storage service of your choice — that's the only lasting copy once the 48 hours have passed.

If you miss this window, simply run a new backup as long as the original mailbox is still accessible; however, if the address has already been cancelled in the meantime, there's nothing left to back up.

Typical cases

• Switching email provider: you're leaving your current host and the old address will be closed when the contract ends.
• Leaving an employer: your work mailbox will be disabled when you leave, and you want to keep a personal record of your exchanges (within the bounds of your organization's internal rules).
• Cleaning up old addresses: you have several dormant email addresses and want to close some while keeping their content just in case.

In all three cases, the principle is the same: archive while access is still guaranteed, not after.

Reimporting the archive later

The advantage of an .eml archive, over a proprietary format, is that it stays usable long afterward. There are two ways to make it usable again:

• Open the .eml files directly, one by one, in a compatible email client (Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail), without reimporting anything: each .eml file is a complete, readable message as it is.
• Reimport the messages into an actual mailbox (the same one reactivated later, or another one), using MailSync's import tool. Two limits to know before starting: the tool accepts .mbox or .eml files, not a .zip archive — so you first need to unzip the archive on your disk to extract the .eml files. Also, an import places every selected file (50 maximum per import) into a single destination folder that you choose: for .eml files, the original folder tree isn't reconstructed automatically (that folder reconstruction only applies to a Google Takeout export in .mbox format, imported as-is, not to individual .eml files).

This second option is useful if you'd like these messages to be searchable day-to-day again someday, rather than sitting in a .zip file on a hard drive; for a mailbox with several folders, plan on one import per original folder, in batches of up to 50 .eml files.

A precaution that takes little time

Archiving your mailbox before cancellation only takes as long as the backup itself, usually a few minutes for a mailbox of typical size. Compared to the risk of permanently losing years of exchanges — professional or personal — because the address was closed before thinking of it, it's a precaution that costs far less than the regret it prevents.