Arca Mail Backup

Arca Mail Backup copies your IMAP, Gmail and Outlook accounts to storage you own — a disk, a NAS or an S3-compatible bucket — as plain mbox files you can open without Arca. There is no server of ours in between: everything runs on your Mac, and passwords stay in the macOS Keychain.

Three promises it is built on

• Your storage, not ours — Arca writes to the destination you choose, with your own credentials. We never host a byte of your mail.
• An open format — standard mbox, one file per folder and month, with a JSON manifest and a README. Thunderbird, Apple Mail or Mbox Viewer Pro can open it.
• Runs on its own — backups run in the background and pick up where they left off if interrupted.

Save. Search. Restore.

• Search everything by subject, sender, recipient or text across all accounts — including mail deleted on the server, which stays in your backup marked as deleted. Previews block remote content.
• Restore into the same account: messages go to a new folder, nothing on the server is changed, and by default only what was deleted comes back, so no duplicates.
• Import .mbox files from Google Takeout, Apple Mail or Thunderbird and restore them into your account.

Sources: any IMAP account (your hosting, cPanel, Dovecot…), Gmail and Google Workspace, Outlook.com and Microsoft 365 (Sign in with Microsoft). Destinations: internal or external disk (Free); NAS and S3-compatible storage such as Wasabi, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, Hetzner or AWS (Pro).

Pricing: Free for one account backed up in full to a disk. Pro from $8.99/year, or $44.99 one-time (lifetime, 1 account). We limit features, never the size of your backup.

macOS 14 or later, on the Mac App Store (also on Windows via the Microsoft Store).