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Connecting Email Providers ​

Open Archiver can connect to a variety of email sources to ingest and archive your emails. This section provides guides for connecting to popular email providers.

Choose your provider from the list below to get started:

What gets archived ​

Drafts ​

Unsent drafts from live mailboxes — Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and IMAP — are not archived by default. A draft is not a record of anything: it was never sent, and it changes every time its author touches it. Archiving one goes wrong in both directions, depending on the provider.

Google replaces the underlying message on every save, so each auto-save arrives as a new message with new identifiers. Archived, they accumulate: one email that is still being written can leave a dozen copies behind, plus one more when it is finally sent.

Many IMAP servers do the opposite and keep a single Message-ID from the first save through to the sent message. The draft is archived first, and the message that was actually sent is then taken for a duplicate of it — so the archive keeps an unfinished body and never learns what was really sent.

Set ARCHIVE_DRAFTS=true if you need drafts kept. Note that both behaviours above come back with it.

File imports are not affected. A PST, EML or mbox file is a snapshot you chose to hand over, and it is imported once rather than polled, so neither problem applies. Everything in the file is archived, drafts included, whatever ARCHIVE_DRAFTS is set to.

Junk and Trash ​

Junk and Trash folders are excluded by default on IMAP. Set ALL_INCLUSIVE_ARCHIVE=true to include them. This setting is separate from ARCHIVE_DRAFTS — asking for spam to be archived is not the same as asking for half-written messages.