Gmail Keeper provides you with a quick way to create a locally stored backup for messages in your Gmail inbox, as well as Google Apps e-mails. This way, you can clean an overcrowded mailbox, while knowing that your old messages are safely stored on your computer.

The application can perform backups for multiple accounts, provided you create a new profile for each. To do so, you simply have to follow a series of steps displayed in the wizard-like interface of Gmail Keeper.

You start by activating Gmail IMAP access, so as to allow the application to communicate with your account. The next step requires you to create and configure your backup profile by completing a form with the e-mail address, your password, IMAP server and port number.

Next you have to choose the mailbox folders to backup. Gmail Keeper retrieves the list of folders from the Google servers, along with the associated labels, enabling you to select the ones you want. It can also create local copies of all your mail, including the trash folder, saved drafts and outgoing messages.

Backing up a large inbox could result in lower disk space and that is why the application enables you to limit the size of the messages to backup and filter them by date. The backup archive can be protected by a custom password, so as to prevent unauthorized access to your e-mails.

Gmail Keeper is a great way to backup your mailbox and read messages in offline mode using any mail client. To ease your work even more, it comes with an integrated scheduler that can be configured to perform daily, weekly or monthly backups, saving you the time needed to manually perform this operation.