Many email providers assume that you will read your email using just your web browser.

If this is the way you get your mail, the only consistently usable method of saving an email onto your own machine is to open one email at a time and use the browser "File|Save As" command to save an "html page" of the email. You can then open the saved page from your own machine (offline if you wish) using the same web browser used to save it. This is the method given in a FAQ by Hotmail, but the method should be usable in any reasonably current web browser.

If you are saving messages this way, you must provide an individual filename for each message at the time of saving it. Many html files will have both a "message file" and a same-named "embedded files folder" and changing the name of either after they're saved, even if you're careful to make them identical, usually will result in the message being largely unreadable. If you must change the filename after saving, you should open the message in your browser and re-do the "File|Save As" supplying the new name. You can then delete the old file/folder.

Messages with attachments, saved in this way, may be inconsistent about whether the attachment is automatically saved, so you may have to save attachments separately. Attachments that display (embedded) in the original message usually seem to stick, but emails sent as a "carrier" for an attachment often lose the attachement.

Since each email is saved as a separate file, the only way to look at what's in your backup is one-message-at-a-time. Note once more, that only the filename you use at the time of saving is "visible" to identify a saved email without opening it.

The only practical way that I've found to "restore" a file from this backup to your online server (so as to forward it to someone else?) is to open each file individually and use the browser's Mail|Send Page and email it to yourself. This naturally makes it look like the message is from you, and loses the sender identity and date of the original message.

If someone knows of a way to move entire email folders or an entire email database to a local machine using only a web browser I'd certainly like to hear of it; but please identify WHAT BROWSER you're talking about.

Don't forget that the email service also is the only place your address book exists, unless you figure out a way to save it too.

John