Recover Outlook Passwords

Steve Wiseman — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 03:47:13 +0000

I have gotten this call before – A friend has a new computer. For a free dinner or maybe a few beers (Or Both!) would I help them move everything over?

Sure no problem I say. Just a few word docs, and an email account.

Hmm..an email account.

This friend of mine has used Gmail with Outlook – for a long time. As long as Gmail has been around. Unfortunately he only typed in his password once. Now, he can’t remember it.

So here we are. We have the password on his old machine. I can see those little *** taunting me in Outlook.

Sure, I could email the nice folks at Google and try to recover the password, but I know from experience this will take a long time.

Then I remembered there is an awesome utility from NirSoft called MailPassView. This little gem can pull the passwords out of almost every known email client.

You can download it from here:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mailpv.html

Within a few seconds of launching the app, it found my friend’s account:

A Double click on the entry and I had the password:

Much easier than trying password recovery with Google.

Here is a complete list of the email clients that it supports:

Best of all, this thing is free. You can’t beat that!

Keep this one handy. You will need it someday.

Backup your Gmail account

Steve Wiseman — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:15:33 +0000

I have almost 4 years worth of emails in a Gmail account. I have tried using other services, and even ran my own email server – but I always find Google calling me back with their top notch spam protection.

The problem with that is…well I have 4 years worth of emails. Many of them contain serial numbers to products, important answers to customer questions, and stuff that is simply not replaceable. I never trust computers when it comes to keeping my data secure. I always assume that today it is here, and tomorrow it could be gone.

Backups are easy when it is your own system, but when you have all of your email on a service like Gmail it makes it more difficult to make it part of a backup procedure. I started to get worried about losing it all, so for a few weeks now I have been trying to use MS Outlook to download it to a local PST using IMAP. The account has over 30,000 messages, and Outlook always dies at about the 12,000 message mark.

After some digging (About 3 seconds on Google) I found a free utility that will backup your entire Gmail account to a folder.

Let me start out by telling you the best things about it:

1. It is free – I would pay for a pro version if it would automate the process for me

2. It can restore a backed up account to a current email account

3. The backup is stored in standard eml format – This means you can open messages using Outlook express.

You can download the latest version from http://www.gmail-backup.com

Backing up is a simple process. You download the program, enter your account info, and press the backup button. (The hosted version of Gmail is supported too)

A single form is displayed when you launch the application:

Enter your login information, and a destination for the backup files. Click on the backup button.

Once it is finished, it organizes the backups by date in the destination folder you selected:

You may notice the 1969, and 1970 folders – those are from a few improperly formatted email messages that have an invalid date stamp…it is not a bug.

You can view any of them using Outlook Express by double clicking on a message:

This is a fantastic utility and I highly recommend it.

Remote Administration For Windows » Gmail

Recover Outlook Passwords

Backup your Gmail account