Gmail offers a tremendous amount of storage space for your email and the confidence of the Google name, but the same data vulnerabilities exist. If anything happens to their systems, your data is toast. You should always ensure you have direct, personally accessible backups of all your data; blindly relying on the systems of other providers is a recipe for disaster.

Additionally, Gmail has specific privacy issues to contend with, as their indexers analyze your email in order to provide relevant ads when you’re reading your messages. So If you receive anything sensitive, you should carefully weigh the pros and cons of keeping it in your Gmail account.

Fwd:Vault can eliminate both issues by maintaining a separate backup copy of all your email, and provide a home for your sensitive messages away from prying eyes.

Using Gmail’s built-in filters, automatically backing up your Gmail account is a breeze. Below you will find steps to backup all incoming messages that have attachments. Once you understand the process, you can easily adjust the filter settings to automatically backup all your mail, both incoming and outgoing, to Fwd:Vault’s online backup repository.

Long into your Gmail account, then click the link that reads Create a filter:

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The next page will present a list of the email fields you can sort by. Using their awesome search logic, Google will match messages based on the text you enter. We are going to set this backup for all incoming messages with attachments, so you can ignore the text boxes and just but a checkmark in the box next to Has attachment.

(Pro tip: to select all your messages for filtering, just put a bunch of gobbledygook (e.g. “hjfk fyu845bn vio34gf2″) in the Doesn’t have box. Since no message will have that random crap, it will always match all your messages!)

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Once you check the box and click the Next Step button, you’ll be presented with the actions. Again, there are a lot of cool things you can do here, but we’re only concerned with sending a copy to your Fwd:Vault backup account, so check the box next to Forward it to and enter vault@fwdvault.com in the text field:

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Hit the Create Filter button and you should see a confirmation like the one below, along with a summary of your new email filter!

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To learn more about Gmail’s filtering system, Check out the introduction to filters in their help section, or search the web for more advanced Gmail filter techniques.