i just caught this one today on cnet. very cool freeware utility to make a copy of your gmail email on a local hard drive. you never know when the free email from Google will disappear. hopefully never because we are moving all our web design and hosting clients in and out of Los Angeles onto Google Apps because the email hosting is fantastic. plus it reduces clogging of our email servers too.

This program is aimed to back up and restore your Gmail mailbox. You will need to activate the IMAP access to your mailbox, to do so, please open your Gmail settings and under POP/IMAP tab activate this option. The messages are stored in the local directory in files which names follow the format YYYYMMDD-hhmmss-nn.eml. In case there are more e-mails with the same timestamp there is the number nn which starts with value 1. Label assignment is stored in the file labels.txt which is the plain text file and it pairs the e-mails stored in the file described above with the assigned labels. This version is the first release on CNET Download.com.