Back up your Infomaniak mailboxes

What Infomaniak already does, and what it does not

Infomaniak is a well-run Swiss host and does more than most. Data is replicated, the platform is monitored, and there is a backup you can use to restore a mailbox. For a failed disk or yesterday’s mistake, you are covered.

That restore has three limits. It goes back thirty days on paid plans, so a deletion you only spot at year end or during a dispute is too old. It restores the whole mailbox to where it was, rather than the one email you need. And according to Infomaniak’s own documentation, it does not recover messages a user moved themselves, to a subfolder or to the trash.

The third one is the limit people run into most. Someone moves emails to the trash, the trash gets emptied, and nobody notices for weeks. Infomaniak’s restore is built to put a mailbox back after it was wiped yesterday. It is not built to find one thread from March with a supplier without pushing two thousand messages back into someone’s inbox.

The exact terms are on Infomaniak’s help page. It is worth reading before you decide whether you need a separate backup.

• Replication covers hardware failures. When a user deletes something, the deletion is replicated too.
• Infomaniak’s restore covers the last month, for the whole mailbox, and leaves out messages that were moved by hand.
• A manual export is a copy from one day. Anything that arrives after that is not in it.

The settings

You do not need to install anything at Infomaniak, and there is no module or delegation to set up. istorel connects the same way Thunderbird would, with read-only access.

How it works

Add the mailbox in the console and the first backup starts within a minute. After that, each run only fetches what has changed. If you have a lot of mailboxes, a CSV import adds them all in one go.

From then on there is nothing to do. If a backup stops working, for example because an application password was revoked, we email you with the mailbox name and the date it last succeeded.

You manage several kSuite organisations

Most of our customers are in this situation. Each end client gets its own organisation, kept apart from the others. Volume pricing is worked out on every mailbox in your account, so thirty clients with ten mailboxes each count as three hundred mailboxes.

We invoice you for the whole account, and you bill your clients however you like. An end client you give access to sees no prices, no invoices and none of your other clients.

Questions

Does it work with kSuite and kMail?

Yes. kMail supports IMAP, which is all we need. Mailboxes in a kSuite organisation can be added one at a time or through a CSV import.

Infomaniak already keeps thirty days. Why pay for more?

Infomaniak’s backup is mainly there to put a recently wiped mailbox back. After a month there is nothing left, the restore works on the whole mailbox rather than a single email, and Infomaniak’s documentation says it does not recover messages moved on purpose, including to the trash. That last case is the most common one. istorel keeps everything for at least two years, up to ten if you choose, and lets you find and download a single message. If thirty days and a full-mailbox restore are enough for you, you do not need us.

Do I need an application password?

Yes, if two-factor authentication is on, and we recommend it should be. Otherwise the mailbox password works. Either way, we encrypt it as soon as it is saved, with a key that never leaves our environment, and it is never shown again.

Can you write to my mailbox?

No. istorel always opens the mailbox read-only. It never changes, moves or deletes a message.

Where are the backups stored?

In France, on OVHcloud object storage replicated across three availability zones. OVHcloud encrypts the data at rest. Other regions are available on request.

How much does it cost?

4.99 € excl. VAT per mailbox per month for your first twenty-four mailboxes, and less for the ones after that. Each mailbox comes with 100 GB of storage, pooled across your whole account. If you go over, it is 1.99 € excl. VAT for each extra 100 GB or part of it.