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My laptop got stolen...I want to erase all Gmail emails and backup

  • 1 प्रत्युत्तर दें
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  • के द्वारा अंतिम प्रतियुतर christ1

Big T.
Big T.
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long story short. My laptop got stolen. I have Mozilla installed in that laptop. I've changed all email passwords. To minimize the lost, I'm thinking, first backup all my Mozilla email accounts and all emails (using importexport tool to EML format), Then delete all emails on Gmail webpage ( delete from server), then restore/import my just backed up emails to Mozilla in a different PC

Does it make sense? Can it prevent the thief to see my emails on a stolen laptop? I think my key question is when you back up all Mozilla accs and emails, will they actually download to your local hard drive? I'm using the IMAP setting on Mozilla.

Thanks for all the help!

long story short. My laptop got stolen. I have Mozilla installed in that laptop. I've changed all email passwords. To minimize the lost, I'm thinking, first backup all my Mozilla email accounts and all emails (using importexport tool to EML format), Then delete all emails on Gmail webpage ( delete from server), then restore/import my just backed up emails to Mozilla in a different PC Does it make sense? Can it prevent the thief to see my emails on a stolen laptop? I think my key question is when you back up all Mozilla accs and emails, will they actually download to your local hard drive? I'm using the IMAP setting on Mozilla. Thanks for all the help!

All Replies (1)

christ1
christ1
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I'm thinking, first backup all my Mozilla email accounts

Not sure what that means. There is no such thing as 'Mozilla email accounts'. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-faq#w_what-is-my-thunderbird-email-address

backup all my ... accounts and all emails (using importexport tool to EML format)

When your laptop got lost, how exactly would you do that?

Then delete all emails on Gmail webpage ( delete from server), then restore/import my just backed up emails to Mozilla in a different PC

While that's technically possible, what's the point of doing it? The result would be exactly the same as it was before. By changing the password(s) of your email account(s) those should be safe. If you did reuse the old account passwords for other accounts too, you should change those as well. With Gmail it's recommended to turn on 2-step authentication, which provides additional protection.

Can it prevent the thief to see my emails on a stolen laptop?

Was the disk of the laptop fully encrypted, and was the laptop shut down when it got lost? If not, then technically the disk content can be accessed, including your mail archive stored on the local disk. With IMAP not all messages may be stored locally, you'd need to turn on synchronization in Thunderbird for that. https://support.mozilla.org/kb/imap-synchronization