If you are using a Microsoft account as your primary email ID, you likely have thousands of important emails, tens of contacts and calendar items in your Outlook.com mailbox.

You might ask why anyone would want to backup emails and contacts from Outlook.com? Well, Outlook.com is a trustworthy webmail service from Microsoft and is here to stay. That said, if you have emails with crucial data, having an offline copy of your mailbox makes sense these days.

The other advantage of backing up your mailbox is that you can access all emails when you are offline as well.

Backing up your Outlook.com emails, contacts and calendar items is an easy job thanks to the export mailbox feature in Outlook.com. You don’t need to rely on a third-party service or tool to backup your Outlook.com account.

Your mailbox backup includes all emails in the inbox, drafts, sent items, junk emails,

Refer to the given below directions to download all emails, contacts, and calendar items from your Outlook.com mailbox.

Backup emails, contacts and calendar from Outlook.com

Note that you cannot use this method to backup only specific emails and contacts.

Step 1: Visit Outlook.com in your web browser and then sign-in to your account.

Step 2: Click on the gear/settings icon and then click View all Outlook settings link. It will open the Outlook settings page now.

Step 3: On the Settings page, navigate to General > Privacy and data.

Step 4: In the Export mailbox section, click on the Export mailbox button. Outlook.com will prepare the backup copy in about four days and will send an email with a link to download the mailbox.

If you don’t get an email with download link even after four days, revisit the same section (General > Privacy), you will get the Download now link. Click on the Download now link to begin downloading the mailbox containing your emails, contacts and calendar items.

The mailbox backup copy comes with PST extension. You need Office Outlook software in order to open the mailbox backup copy (PST) file. If you don’t have Office Outlook on your PC or cannot afford Office Outlook, use the free PST Viewer software.

Gmail also offers a similar way to download Gmail emails to your computer.