ARE YOU AN e-mail pack rat? If so, you'd probabl~ be loath to lose your archives. To avoid that disaster, try using one of two free backup utilities designed expressly for e-mail: either Arnie Email Backup (amictools.com), which copies every thing¬including your address book, account settings, and message rules-to a single compressed file; or Mail¬Store Home (mailstore.com), which duplicates all of your e-mail into a searchable archive and optionally backs it up to CDs or DVDs for omine storage.

Amic supports nine e-mail clients, including Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora,
and other programs. Mail¬Store Home works with Vis¬"ta's Windows Mail, Outlook, . Out1ook Express, Thun¬derbird, and SeaMonkey.

Of course, unless you put those discs in a safe or up¬load the archive file to the Web, those kinds of backups are still vulnerable to fires and other local disasters. That's one big reason to consider routing your e-mail through Gmail IMAP, which effectively creates a Web¬based archive by syncing mail between Google's serv¬ers and your Pc.

Once you sign up for a free Gmail account, you can either configure your mail account to forward all mes WITH ALL OF your e-mail backed up to MailStore Home, you can search through past messages from any Web-connected PC.
sages to Gmail or set up Gmail's Mail Fetcher to retrieve messages from your ISP's POP3 server. Then en\J.ble IMAP in Gmail and follow the configuration in¬structions for your mail cli¬ent to pick up messages from Google's servers.

When all that setup is done, your mail will go through Gmail, giving you more than 6GB of storage space for messages and attachments, plus some excellent spam filtering to boot. And you'll have copies of all your messages avail¬able on the Web. That's not only an ideal e-mail backup, but just plain handy, too.