Back up your Infomaniak mailboxes

What Infomaniak already does, and what it does not

Infomaniak is a serious Swiss host, and it does more than most: replicated data, an infrastructure that holds without you, and a backup that restores a mailbox. You need nobody for a failed disk, nor for yesterday’s mistake.

That restore has three limits, and they decide whether it is enough for you. It covers thirty days on paid plans: a deletion found at quarter end, during the accounts, or in the middle of a dispute is out of reach. It works on the whole mailbox, put back where it was, not on the message you are looking for. And by Infomaniak’s own documentation, it does not recover messages a user moved on purpose, to a subfolder or to the trash.

That third limit is the one that matters, because it describes the most common case: someone moves messages to the trash, the trash empties, and nobody notices for weeks. The restore answers « the mailbox was emptied yesterday, put it back ». It does not answer « find me that March exchange with this supplier, without pushing two thousand messages back into someone’s mailbox ».

The exact terms are in Infomaniak’s help page, and we invite you to read them: a comparison you cannot check is worth nothing.

• Replication protects against hardware. It does not protect against someone authorised deleting, since it replicates the deletion faithfully.
• Infomaniak’s restore protects the past month, in bulk, and not messages moved by hand. It does not protect last quarter, and it does not return a single message.
• A manual export protects once. It does not protect what happened since.

The settings

Nothing to install at Infomaniak, no module, no delegation. istorel connects the way Thunderbird would, read-only.

How it goes

You declare the mailbox in the console, the first run starts within a minute, and the ones after read only what changed. A whole book of mailboxes is declared at once through a CSV import.

After that you leave it alone: monitoring is ours. If a backup stops working, because an application password was revoked for instance, you get an email saying which mailbox, and since when.

You manage several kSuite organisations

That is our most common case. Each end client lives in its own organisation, isolated from the others, and the mailboxes of the whole account count together for the decreasing brackets: thirty clients of ten mailboxes are three hundred mailboxes, priced as three hundred.

Billing stays yours. An end client never sees a price, or the existence of your other clients.

Questions

Does it work with kSuite and kMail?

Yes. kMail speaks IMAP, and that is all we need. The mailboxes of a kSuite organisation are declared one by one or through a CSV import.

Infomaniak already keeps thirty days, why pay for more?

Because those thirty days answer one question only: « the mailbox was emptied recently, put it back ». Past the month there is nothing left, the restore covers the whole mailbox rather than the message you want, and Infomaniak’s documentation states that it does not recover messages moved on purpose, including to the trash. That is the most common case. istorel keeps everything, with no age limit, and returns a single message. If your need fits inside thirty days and a bulk restore, Infomaniak’s backup is enough, and we will tell you so.

Do I need an application password?

You do if two-factor authentication is on, which it should be. Otherwise the mailbox password is enough. Either way it is encrypted on save here and never read back.

Can you write into my mailbox?

No. The connection is opened read-only, always. A compromise of our service would read your messages, it would not destroy them.

Where are the backups stored?

In France, on OVHcloud object storage, replicated across three independent availability zones. Other regions on request.

What does it cost?

4.99 € per mailbox per month for the first twenty-four, less after that, with 100 GB of storage included per mailbox and pooled across the account. Beyond the pool, 1.99 € per started block of 100 GB.