How to Back Up Office 365 or Gmail Email to Your Own Cloud
Your mailbox, mirrored to storage you own — Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, S3, FTP
Your email provider is not a backup. Accounts get suspended, credentials get stolen, and a wrong click deletes years of correspondence. This guide shows how to back up an Office 365 mailbox to Dropbox, export Gmail to your own cloud, or mirror any IMAP mailbox to storage you control — encrypted with AES-256, incremental, GDPR-friendly, and with no AI ever reading your mail.
🎯 Why “It’s in the Cloud” Is Not a Backup
Most businesses assume that because email lives at Microsoft or Google, it is safe. But the provider protects its infrastructure, not your access. The everyday failure modes have nothing to do with data centres burning down:
- Account suspension or lockout. A billing issue, a flagged login or a policy decision can cut you off from every email you have ever received — instantly and sometimes permanently.
- Human deletion. An employee empties the wrong folder, a leaver’s mailbox is purged after 30 days, a retention policy quietly expires old mail.
- Account takeover. A phished password lets an attacker delete or ransom your correspondence.
- Compliance and GDPR. If email is business record — orders, contracts, invoices — you need your own retrievable copy, in a location and format you control, independent of any single processor.
- Provider dependency. Want to leave your provider one day? Without your own copy, your history is a hostage.
The fix is old-fashioned and effective: keep a second, independent copy of every email in storage that belongs to you — and keep it current automatically.
🔧 The Usual Approaches — and Their Gaps
Manual exports (PST files, Google Takeout)
One-off exports work for a snapshot, but they are manual, easy to forget, and produce monolithic archive files you can’t browse without special software. A backup you have to remember to run is a backup you will eventually not have.
Desktop email clients as “archives”
Keeping Outlook or Thunderbird syncing to a local machine sort of works — until the laptop dies, the profile corrupts, or the one PC holding the archive is reinstalled. It also backs up one person’s mail, on one machine, with no encryption and no reports.
Third-party backup SaaS that stores your email on their servers
Many email backup services copy your mailbox onto their infrastructure. That solves the deletion problem but creates a new one: a second company now holds all your correspondence, and GDPR-wise you’ve added another processor with full content access. For sensitive business mail, that is often exactly what you were trying to avoid.
⚠️ The question to ask any email backup tool
“Where does my data actually end up, and who can read it on the way?” The best answer: in your own cloud account, encrypted with your own password, with no third party storing a copy and no AI analyzing the content.
🤖 The Automated Way: Mail2CLOUD
Mail2CLOUD by BOTS4.me continuously mirrors your mailbox to cloud storage you own — your Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, AWS S3, Azure Blob, or your own FTP/SFTP server. The data flows directly from your mailbox to your storage. BOTS4.me never stores your emails, and the app is 100% rule-based: no AI reads, classifies or “learns from” your mail. Optional AES-256 encryption with your own password means even a shared backup folder stays private.
Your mailbox (O365, Gmail, IMAP)
Mail2CLOUD incremental run
Optional AES-256 + ZIP
YOUR cloud / FTP — folder structure preserved
Setup in about 5 minutes
- Step 1 — Register: Create an account at bots4.me/bots and add the Mail2CLOUD app. First month free, cancel anytime.
- Step 2 — Connect your mailbox: Secure Quick Connect (OAuth) for Office 365 and Gmail — or IMAP credentials for Exchange, Zoho, GMX and any other provider.
- Step 3 — Connect your storage: Add one or more destinations: Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, AWS S3 (plus Wasabi and Backblaze B2), Azure Blob, FTP/FTPS/SFTP or WebDAV. Multiple destinations are written simultaneously.
- Step 4 — Choose a mode: Backup (one-way to cloud), Restore (cloud back to a mailbox) or Sync (bidirectional with conflict resolution). Set encryption and compression — Mail2CLOUD then runs automatically every night.
- Step 5 — Start in Demo Mode: Mail2CLOUD scans your real mailbox but uploads nothing, sending preview reports of exactly what it would back up. Flip to live from the Control tab when you’re confident.
📁 What Your Backup Actually Looks Like
Mail2CLOUD doesn’t produce an opaque archive blob. Every email becomes a browsable folder — readable HTML for the message, JSON for the metadata, and the original attachments as plain files — organised in the exact folder structure of your mailbox:
You can open any email in a browser, search your backups with your cloud provider’s own search, and hand auditors a self-explanatory file tree — no proprietary reader required.
- Incremental runs: only new and changed emails are processed, so daily runs stay fast and cheap on storage.
- Move and deletion detection: the backup tracks folder moves and removed emails instead of piling up stale duplicates.
- One-click restore: push a backup back into the same mailbox — or a different one, which makes Mail2CLOUD a practical migration tool between providers.
- Reports and logs: an email report after every run, full activity logs in the dashboard, every feature individually toggleable, protected by 2FA, EU-hosted and GDPR-native.
🔐 The data-ownership guarantee
Backups go directly to your own accounts — BOTS4.me never stores, reads or analyzes your email content. Processing is purely rule-based: no AI touches your mail. With AES-256 encryption enabled, only someone with your password can open the files. Your emails, your storage, your keys. Details at bots4.me/security.
🌍 Supported Mailboxes and Destinations
Email sources: Office 365 / Outlook.com, Gmail and Google Workspace, Yahoo, iCloud, AOL, Zoho, Yandex, GMX, on-premise Exchange and any IMAP-compatible mailbox — OAuth is managed for Gmail and Office 365.
Storage destinations: Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, AWS S3, Wasabi, Backblaze B2, Azure Blob, FTP, FTPS, SFTP and WebDAV. You can back up one mailbox to several destinations at once — for example Dropbox for daily browsing plus an S3 bucket as cold storage.
Cross-provider combinations are the point: export Gmail to OneDrive, back up Office 365 to Google Drive, or mirror an old IMAP account into S3 before you decommission it.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
How do I back up an Office 365 mailbox to Dropbox automatically?
Connect your Office 365 account to Mail2CLOUD via OAuth at bots4.me/bots, add Dropbox as a destination, choose Backup mode and a schedule. Mail2CLOUD then mirrors the mailbox to Dropbox incrementally — every email as browsable HTML plus attachments, preserving your folder structure. Setup takes about 5 minutes.
Can I export Gmail to my own cloud storage on a schedule?
Yes. Unlike a one-off Google Takeout export, Mail2CLOUD runs automatically every night and only processes new and changed emails. Destinations include Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, AWS S3, Azure Blob and your own FTP/SFTP server.
Is this email backup GDPR-compliant — where is my data stored?
Your backups are stored only in cloud accounts you own — BOTS4.me never keeps a copy of your emails, which keeps your processor chain short. The BOTS4.me platform itself is EU-hosted and GDPR-native, with 2FA and full activity logs. Optional AES-256 encryption with your own password adds a layer even your storage provider can’t see through.
Does any AI read my emails during backup?
No. Mail2CLOUD is 100% rule-based. No AI model reads, classifies, summarizes or trains on your email content — the app copies messages and attachments, verifies them, and writes a log. That’s it.
What format are the backed-up emails — do I need special software to read them?
No special software. Each email becomes a folder containing the message as readable HTML, its metadata as JSON, and every attachment as an ordinary file, organised in your mailbox’s original folder structure. Any browser and any file manager can open a backup from ten years ago.
Can I restore emails back into a mailbox or migrate to a new provider?
Yes. Restore mode pushes a backup from your cloud storage back into a mailbox with one click — the original one or a different one. Sync mode goes further with full bidirectional synchronization and conflict resolution, useful for keeping a mailbox and an archive aligned.
What happens when emails are deleted or moved in the mailbox?
Mail2CLOUD’s incremental engine includes move detection and deletion detection: folder moves are tracked instead of duplicated, and removals are recorded in the backup log, so your archive reflects reality rather than accumulating stale copies.
Can I back up one mailbox to several destinations at the same time?
Yes. Multiple destinations are supported simultaneously — every run uploads to all configured providers, for example Google Drive for convenience plus Backblaze B2 or S3 as an independent second copy.
📚 Related Guides
- Spam: How to stop spam permanently for your whole company — clean the mailbox you’re about to back up.
- Overview: Email automation for small business — spam, backup and order import in one setup.
- Orders: Import email orders and RFQs into Odoo automatically — Mail2CLOUD backs up the same business mailbox Mail2ERP processes.
- Hub: How to automate Odoo end-to-end.
🔗 Sources and Further Reading
Official documentation and standards referenced in this guide. External links open in a new tab.
Own Your Email History — Starting Today
Connect a mailbox and a cloud destination in about 5 minutes, watch Demo Mode preview your first backup, then flip the switch. First month free, cancel anytime.