Backing Up Mail or Restoring Backed Up Mail
Applies to: CommunicatorOperating Systems: All
Problem Symptoms: "How can I back up or restore already backed up mail in Netscape"
Solutions:
Netscape keeps all of your mail messages in simple text files. You will find these files in the mail directory in your user profile. If you installed Netscape to the default location, and your profile is stored in the default location, you will find your profile under
C:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\[username]. For example, if your profile was named "Bob", your profile would be located inC:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\Bob. Your mail would be located inC:\Program Files\Netscape\users\Bob\Mail. Each mail folder you have in Netscape is stored as one file on your hard drive -- mail folders in Netscape Messenger are not stored as directories. Your Inbox is stored as a file named just "Inbox", your Sent folder is stored as a file named just "Sent" and so on. Each file that represents a folder in Messenger should be accompanied by a file by the same name with an extension of .snm. It is unnecessary to backup .snm files. They simply store summary or indexing information, such as the order in which to display messages, but they do not contain any of your actual messages
One other important file to back up might be a file named rules.dat. If this file exists in your mail directory, it means you have mail filters defined and rules.dat is where they are stored. If you do not know what mail filters are, then you probably don't have any set up.
Backing Up Your Mail
To back up your mail, simply copy each file (remember that the files containing your messages have no extension) to the location where you would like to save them. Make sure that you look in all the sub directories of the Mail directory, if there are any, for mail files. You can just copy the files somewhere else by using your right mouse button to drag them to another location in Windows Explorer. When you let up the right mouse button over the location where you want to back them up choose Copy Here. Since mail files can get rather large, you may want to compress them with a utility such as WinZip.Restoring Mail Previously Backed Up
To restore mail that you have previously backed up, simply apply the procedures for backing your mail up in reverse. Be careful not to overwrite files that are already in your profile's mail directory. For example, if you copy a file named "Inbox" to your profile's mail directory it will overwrite any file that is already there named "Inbox" -- if this happens you will lose all mail that was in the already existing Inbox. To avoid this, rename the files before copying them back into your profile's Mail directory.If you want to merge the contents of your newly restored mail with your already existing mail, simply follow the instructions above to restore the mail into your profile's Mail directory. Then when you open Netscape Mail you should see a new mail folder with the name you gave it when you copied it into your mail directory. Open this mail folder and select messages you want to merge and right-click. This will give you the option of moving or copying the messages to any other folder in your mail.
