I rec­om­mend Gmail to every­one who asks, and many who don’t, as it is far supe­rior to every other email plat­form around. But being para­noid, I don’t like all that valu­able email in some­one else’s hands. What if Google goes bust one day? Or the Aus­tralian government’s inter­net fil­ter stops gmail? Or I move to China? So I need a local backup just in case. I also need the backup to be pain­less and not require much attention.

The solu­tion is Thun­der­bird, but there is a bit of set­ting up to do at first, then you can sit back and let it do its work. The instruc­tions are here. You need to fol­low them — sim­ply set­ting up Thun­der­bird to access your gmail is not enough as Thun­der­bird won’t down­load your mail for local stor­age by default.

Once you’ve set up Thun­der­bird to down­load every­thing, all you need to do is open Thun­der­bird every few weeks and leave it to do it’s stuff.

If that’s too much work, you can always have Thun­der­bird open auto­mat­i­cally at start up but stay min­i­mized to the tray.

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• Use Mende­ley to man­age your references