The current "trend," viciously implemented by Hotmail as an example, is to discourage the use of an email program and encourage (by means including extortion) everyone to just use their browser for email.

Some browsers include "email-ish" capabilities for handling problems of this sort, but others don't do much about it.

When you view your email in a browser, it's difficult to access folders on your own computer in order to move stuff off the email server and onto your own computer. Whether you can do it depends on both the browser and on the email server (i.e. on the isp).

Some ISPs require you to install a program on your own machine, and a program that the ISP foists on you may have features to allow local saving of messages. Some do not do anything to facilitate this.

If you use an "email program" such as Outlook or Outlook Express, you may see a separate section in the folders in the email program. Outlook Express calls it "Local Folders." A separate "Hotmail" folder is where all your email goes initially if you're using Hotmail or MSN as your email provider.

Messages in the "Hotmail" folder may or may not be actually "on your machine." The "index" is stored locally so that you can see what messages were there the last time you received them; but the messages go to "Temporary" files when first downloaded, so that often it's necessary to connect and re-receive them in order to read them again later.

In OE at least, you can move messages to a Local Folder, and in theory at least, they are then actually written to your own drive. Once they are there, you can exit OE and copy the email folder to someplace else on your machine and the folder will contain all of the mail. You then can safely(?) go back to OE and delete the messages you don't need to keep "up front."

The email folder you want to copy should be at C:\Documents and Settings\your username\email. Once it's copied elsewhere, OE calls it a "backup store."

If you want a message from the backup copy, you use File|Import in OE to bring them back into OE. Note that you can only import folders from the store, not individual messages, so it's recommended that you do some sorting and use File|Compact All before you save the backup.

Also note that any message that's in the Local Folders in OE, that also is in a folder that you import from backup, will get a new record number when imported and will appear twice in OE. This can get "confusing."

In OE, you can also use File|Save As to save individual messages as either html pages or as "email files." Saved as "email" from OE, the files will have the extension ".eml" and can be opened individually in OE. A big bunch of files saved as individual .eml files will use a lot more drive space than if saved all to gether in a backup store by copying the email folder, but can be accessed/opened individually.

Occasionally we've received email with an attachment (an email) having a ".email" extension. I don't know what program produces this "form," but usually if you save the attachment as a separate file and change the extension to .eml OE will open it. (Outlook may also, although I haven't tried it.)

There are few generally useful instructions that don't require knowing who your email ISP is, whether you've installed "their" programs, and what program (browser or email program) you use to read your email. I can't give much detail on what can be done except for Outlook Express since that's the only way I generally access my own mail.

John