Keeping e-mails when you change provider

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Does anyone know if there is any way one can keep electronic copies of all e-mails when you change provider. From the information I have, once you change provider ie from Virgin Media to another, after six months all of your e-mails are wiped from your system. I for instance have e-mails going back 12 years and many contain business information and records which are extremely important and necessary to keep and at times refer to. All of these emails have been properly and carefully filed away in my files, relating to businesses and subject matters and there are obviously thousands of them

It is understood that in theory you could forward all e-mails to say google mail (g-mail) but this would not be practical because of thousands of e-mails involved.

It would appear therefore that one is compelled to stay with the same provider, if you need to keep all historic e-mail transmissions?
 
I've been in a similar boat to you and despite advances I don't have faith in electronic storage. I've archived stuff on cd and portable hard drives but the only online way I've gone is to store duplicate data on differing platforms.
 
Thank you Manstein; can you let me know of how did you (sort of) copy and paste e-mails onto a storage device; apologies, I can use e-mails and I can properly file them in separate sub folders, but that is as far as my technical expertise goes. It would be good if you some how, do a mass cut and paste exercise merely so that you have records of all of the transmission; but of course I'm not at all sure if this is possible.
In affect this situation means that people who have important historical e-mail threads are really forced to continue with the same provider ad infinitum?
 
One way of sorting this would be to use Outlook. Set up the old provider and outlook will pull in the e-mails, these can then be saved as OST files. Outlook can then be pointed at your new provider so you will have new and old together. Personally I use Microsoft 365 so I have the latest outlook version plus excel etc and lots of cloud storage with one drive. Hope this helps!
Cheers
Paul
 
Thanks Paul; I use Outlook with Microsoft Windows 10 (the one with a one-off payment; not the 365); does this mean that should I change providers (I'm currently with Virgin Media) all of my e-mails should stay put in my Outlook file? Apologies again for probably not probably fully understanding the basics. Say for example I changed to BT; would my new e-mails (under a new e-mail name) also end up in my Outlook In (Received) folder?
 
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Similarly, I went through this last week. I used Outlook (app) too. Thunderbird can also be used.

I setup my existing email account (transferring away from) and the new (transferring into) within the Outlook app. I then dragged and dropped the emails I want to transfer from one provider to the other. I even created subfolders in the new account and dragged emails from the older account into them. For instance, I had a folder for "Bills". Historical emails about utilities - could simply be transferred across to the new account, and thus saved. If that makes sense?
 
Whitesix, depends on how you structure things, you’ll have to add a new account so the old emails should just remain. Remember to back up the pst file in case you need to re import or do as Glen suggests.

I had an issue recently changing servers and MS support we’re really useful talking me thru technical stuff
 
Thanks Glen_Lee and Paul; my e-mails are stored on my PC not my phone; so will my Virgin media e-mails that are in my Outlook programme eventually be lost if I don't transfer them to the new provider. ie does Outlook stand on its own or is it actually linked to the provider you are transferring to ie could I have all of my defunct e-mails in my Outlook for Virgin Media and all my New e-mails say with BT in an Outlook linked with BT?

I appreciate that I may not be making sense!
PS I will also contact MS support as suggested
 
Thanks Glen_Lee and Paul; my e-mails are stored on my PC not my phone; so will my Virgin media e-mails that are in my Outlook programme eventually be lost if I don't transfer them to the new provider. ie does Outlook stand on its own or is it actually linked to the provider you are transferring to ie could I have all of my defunct e-mails in my Outlook for Virgin Media and all my New e-mails say with BT in an Outlook linked with BT?

I appreciate that I may not be making sense!
PS I will also contact MS support as suggested
I'm not a techie - the Outlook app, I think is way of organising, reading and responding to emails. It's how the accounts are setup which is the clever bit. I set the accounts up as IMAP. That way the emails are stored in the cloud, not the computer. The latter would be POP3. Apologies if I'm wrong.

For me - I went from Gmail to Mailfence - I simply use Outlook to as a way of accessing the emails. The emails sit on Mailfences servers. I could access them via the Mailfence webpage and still be able to see them. When I used Outlook to transfer the emails from Gmail - such as "Bills" in the above example, to my new Mailfence account using Outlook - when I log onto Mailfence on my phone, I can see the transferred emails. Thus, the old Gmail emails are now stored on the Mailfence servers. Not my PC. They are going nowhere, unless I physically delete them.

I guess Outlook wont be linked to Virgin or BT - just a way of managing your emails. I used Youtube videos to work out what to do. Again, I'm no geek.
 
When your old provider account is closed these will likely disappear from outlook in time. As mentioned above backup your PST file and you should be able to open that as a stand alone inbox in future even when your old account is closed. I'd recommend not using an email related to your service provider as you are tied to that going forward so you are better off using something like Gmail as it is not tied to your provider for any future moves.
 
How I did it :
Set both providers to IMAP if not already
Install Thunderbird an other mail client that supports IMAP
Move your mails from the old account to the new account in the mail client.
If you have a lot of mails it can take quite some time.
 
Thank you all again. My issue is that I have thousands of emails going back to 2011, many of which contain important information and attachments. Many of which are business matters; but I am merely an individual, working from a Dell lap top, which runs by Windows 10 and I work with Microsoft Office Professional (ie for Word & Excel). I do understand the word server, but I assume that this relates to a large office set up where many people are working and then all of their individual work and emails are saved on the company server. Or thinking about it is Virgin acting as a "server" for my emails,

I need to look up terms such as IMAP and PST files as again this is out of my knowledge range. I also need to find out exactly what Outlook is; I'm assuming that it merely enables e-mails to be sent and received and of course filed.

I have put Zorro's links into my bookmark for safe keeping and will go through them carefully.

To transfer individual e-mails one at a time will not be possible, because of the number of emails involved. As I see it I only need copies of the e-mails, because if I needed to, I could then reactivate in order to forward them or send them under my new email provider and name.

Incidentally, when I enquired if I could change from Virgin to Sky, the people at Sky emphatically said that I would not lose any e-mails and that I could keep my old (virgin) e-mail address, of course until I challenged this at a senior management level, where they of course apologised for misleading me.
 
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If you use the "Export to a file option" and select that particular inbox / email account (make sure to tick the "include subfolders" option) then you will create a copy of all those folders, emails and attachments to date in one file on your pc.

The "open data file" option then allows you to reopen that file and recreate a local copy of the folders, emails and attachments within outlook for future reference.

"Archive" does a similar thing.

This functionality is intended for those occasions when you want to keep copies of all emails from an account that you won't have future access to, or for when you want to delete emails but keep copies of them (to reduce the size of your email account, for example)

Do bare in mind that these data files are unique to outlook, so you need to keep using it on future pc's to be able to load these backup files.
 
I would also suggest that you investigate Microsoft 365 Business subscriptions.

"Microsoft Buisness Basic" would give you an Exchange email account for approx £4 per month which would offer true portability of emails across all devices and would also allow you to purchase your own domain for a personalised email address. You would no longer have to worry about using the free emails supplied by your ISP.

"Microsoft Business Standard" is for approx £10 per month would give you Exchange email + the latest version of Office and 1tb of cloud storage. All of this can be accessed from pc or phone which is great for being able to access your work email and documents anywhere.
 
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