Your Email Archive: How Not to Lose Years of Correspondence When the Mailbox Fills Up, You Change Provider or Domain or Move to a New Computer — and Why Old POP3 Settings Quietly Delete Mail from the Server

For many people and companies, the mailbox is effectively an archive of everything they do: contracts and the discussions around them, client approvals, invoices, replies from government bodies, ten or more years of correspondence with partners. Yet few think about keeping it safe. Email is "just there" — until one day the mailbox fills up and new messages stop arriving, Outlook reports that the data file is corrupted, a move to a new computer reveals that old messages stayed on the old drive, or the company changes email hosting and forgets to move the archive. Let's look at where email is actually stored and how to keep it.

Where your messages are stored

• On the email service's server — cloud email, or corporate email on a hosting service. Messages are available from any device.
• On the computer — in an email program such as Outlook or Thunderbird, in data files. If the program is set to download messages and delete them from the server, the only copy ends up on the computer.
• In both places — with proper syncing.

IMAP and POP3: a subtle difference with big consequences

The IMAP protocol syncs the email program with the server: messages are stored on the server, and the program shows a copy. The POP3 protocol, common in older setups, downloads messages to the computer and often deletes them from the server. Many companies work on POP3 for years without knowing it. As a result, an employee's entire correspondence exists in a single file on their computer, and a drive failure, a stolen laptop or a Windows reinstall wipes it out completely. With POP3, messages from one computer also don't appear on the phone, which people often take for a "glitch".

Outlook files: PST and OST

Outlook stores mail in data files. A PST file is a self-contained archive, often the only store of messages with POP3 or in "archive" folders. An OST file is a local copy of mail from the server. Large PST files that have grown to tens of gigabytes are slow and more prone to corruption, especially after a sudden power cut or a computer freeze. Outlook refuses to open a corrupted file, and the built-in repair tool doesn't always help — sometimes it deletes damaged fragments together with the messages in them.

A full mailbox

Most email services have a storage limit. When the mailbox is full, new messages bounce back to senders, and you may not notice for a long time. The answer isn't mass-deleting old messages but archiving: moving old correspondence to an archive while keeping its structure and searchability, upgrading the plan, or clearing out large attachments.

Changing provider, domain or computer

When you change email hosting or move to a new domain, mail doesn't move by itself. It has to be migrated from server to server with folders, dates and attachments intact — for every employee. Mistakes here are costly: missing folders, duplicates, broken encoding in messages written in Georgian and Russian. When moving to a new computer, it's important to transfer not just the program but every data file, including archive PSTs the user may have forgotten about.

A departed employee's mailbox

When an employee leaves, their mailbox is often simply deleted — along with their correspondence with clients and suppliers. It's better to save the mailbox archive somewhere accessible to the company before deletion, or give the manager access, and then forward incoming mail to the new person responsible.

How to preserve your email archive

• Use IMAP or corporate sync, not POP3 with deletion from the server.
• Regularly export the mail archive to a separate file and keep it off the computer.
• For cloud email, use backup services or regular exports.
• Don't let PST files grow enormous; split the archive by year.
• When changing provider or domain, migrate mail according to a plan, not "however it turns out".

What our technician does

1. Checks where mail is stored, which protocol the program uses and how much mail there is.
2. Moves mailboxes to IMAP or corporate sync without losing old messages.
3. Repairs corrupted Outlook files or extracts the messages from them.
4. Migrates mail when changing hosting, domain or computer, preserving its structure.
5. Sets up regular archiving and backups of email.

A real example

A law firm in Mtatsminda was moving to a new email host. It turned out that two senior partners' mail had run on POP3 for ten years, and all their client correspondence was stored only in PST files of 30 GB each — and one of those files was already corrupted, with Outlook freezing regularly. We repaired the damaged file, extracted the messages, moved both partners' archives to the new server over IMAP with their folders intact, and then set up a monthly export of every employee's mail archive to the firm's NAS.

Don't forget attachments either: contracts, certificates and scans often exist only as email attachments. If the mailbox is deleted, documents saved nowhere else disappear with it.

Call a technician

If you've lost messages, Outlook won't open its data file or you need mail migrated, we'll help in any district of Tbilisi around the clock. Learn more on our data recovery, computer setup and software installation pages.