PCWorld: Save Your Cloud Mail Locally With Gmail Keeper
Gmail Keeper downloads your messages – or whichever subset of them you specify – and stores them on your computer in compressed format.
“Even the biggest companies can suffer outages, and Internet access is not always available. These factors cast a dark shadow of doubt over anyone who has potentially vital information stored in “the cloud” as opposed to their own system. Gmail is one of the most commonly used mail systems, but just about anyone who uses it for non-trivial purposes has to wonder “What if it goes down?” or even “What if I just can’t connect to the net?” Gmail Keeper ($30, free demo with limitations) offers one solution: regular downloads of your Google mail, storing it in .zip files on your local disk.
Gmail Keeper isn’t an e-mail program in itself; all it does is download your Gmail according to your specifications. You can filter by date, mailbox, and/or label–perhaps you want to back up only messages labeled “Work,” or only messages from the last three months. You can create multiple profiles to enable you to back up different Gmail accounts, or to do a “big backup” once a month but an “important mail” backup daily. (The demo version supports only one profile and will save a maximum of 300 messages.)”