text: i need help making a batch file to backup emails? i work for the school district and the email is setup like yahoo mail or hotmail, where the teachers have to log on to the internet to get their email.  outlook is not useable or any other pop3 programs.  i want to make a way to backup the email files by mass sending them to another email account, saving them to the computer, or some other possible way.  i thought of using a batch file, but i don't know how to do it.  please help! what mail servers are you running and where are the mail databases stored (what kind of storage, not what physical location)?   most commercial, business-grade backup software is email server aware and comes with different api's for the various back-end platforms (ms exchange, sendmail, groupwise, etc). the least complicated and most effective solution is to leverage the backup product you already have, and call the appropriate api's to back up your mail databases as part of your regular backup routines.  if you're an end user and not a tech, you won't have the access rights to run a batch file or anything else against the mail server so your only choice is to manually forward the existing emails to a personal account somewhere. that'd be each person forwarding all their own emails. you *may* be able to set up a "rule" to forward any new, incoming mail but you won't be able to forward the existing mail other than manually. and many mail systems block outgoing mail if it's bound for the internet and has been automatically forwarded, for security reasons.  if i were an end user, i'd check with the it folks to see what they're doing for backups--- you may be worrying about something that's already been taken care of for you. (i get the feeling there's been a major outage somewhere in the recent past for you?)  if you want to discuss further, feel free to send me a message offline--- click on my avatar then click the "send email" link (or whatever it says).  especially if you are a tech. i am positively frightened for you, if you don't have a current backup mechanism in place for your emails.