Back up your OVHcloud mailboxes

What OVHcloud does, and what is left to you

OVHcloud hosts your mailboxes, replicates the data and keeps the platform running. On both MX Plan and Email Pro, hardware failures are their problem, not yours.

Getting back a deleted email is not part of those plans, though. Once the trash is emptied, the message is gone, and support will not roll a mailbox back to how it looked three weeks ago. If you look after a client with thirty mailboxes, someone will eventually ask you for a missing email, and you want a backup in place before that happens.

• Redundancy protects you from hardware failures, not from a user deleting emails.
• Changing plan or domain means moving mailboxes, and the history does not always come across cleanly.
• When an account is closed, its mailbox goes with it, including anything that should have been kept.

The settings for each plan

There is nothing to install at OVHcloud. istorel connects like any mail app, and the username is always the full address.

Add all of a client’s mailboxes at once

A CSV import adds mailboxes in bulk, one per line with the address and password. The report tells you how many were added and lists any lines that failed, with the reason.

After that, we keep an eye on them. If a mailbox stops being backed up, the account administrators get an email with the mailbox name and the date of its last successful backup.

Questions

Does it work with MX Plan, the mail that comes with a domain?

Yes. MX Plan uses IMAP on ssl0.ovh.net, port 993, with the full address as the username. It is the plan we come across most often at small businesses.

What about OVHcloud Exchange?

It works as long as IMAP access is enabled on the mailbox. You will find the server name in the control panel. If an administrator has turned IMAP off, we cannot connect, because IMAP is the only way istorel talks to a mailbox.

Do I need a special password?

The mailbox password is enough. We encrypt it as soon as it is saved, with a key that never leaves our environment, and it is never shown again. If you change it, you will need to enter the new one in istorel.

Where are the backups stored?

In France, on OVHcloud object storage replicated across three availability zones. That means your mailboxes and their backups can be with the same provider, in two separate accounts. If you would prefer another region, let us know.