Email backup for Mac · Coming soon

Your email, kept on storage you own.

Arca Mail Backup copies your IMAP, Gmail and Outlook accounts to your own disk or cloud bucket, as plain mbox files you can open without us.

Notify me at launch See planned pricing

Coming soon to the Mac App Store
Coming soon to the Microsoft Store

Free for one account · macOS 14 or later · Windows coming soon

Arca Mail Backup overview window: “All mail is safe”. Three accounts (Personal on Gmail, Work on IMAP and Club on Microsoft 365) and two destinations, an external disk and Wasabi, all up to date, each noting the messages deleted on the server and kept in the backup. — Every account and destination at a glance, with backups running in the background.

Search window with the query “invoice” across all accounts. The selected message, “Invoice 355 – product photos” with a PDF attachment, is marked “Deleted on server” and can be restored or exported as .eml. — Search every account at once, including mail that was deleted on the server.

Page of the Personal account (Gmail, backed up every day at 2:00 AM): 626 saved messages, 18 deleted on the server and kept, a chart of messages per year, its folders, the space used on the external disk and Wasabi, and the last backups, all completed. — Each account has its own page: saved messages, folders, destinations and backup history.

“Restore to Personal” sheet: messages from this Mac’s copy go into the new folder “Restored Arca 2026-10-08”, keeping folders and labels. 13 will be added, 0 are already there and 581 still on the server are skipped. — Restore into the same account: by default only what was deleted comes back, into a new folder.

Arca Pro sheet: up to 100 accounts by level, NAS and S3-compatible storage, several destinations at once, backups every few hours and folders synced to the cloud. Yearly levels for 1, 5, 10, 50 and 100 accounts with 2 weeks free, and Arca Pro for Life for one account. Prices shown are the planned ones. — Arca Pro adds more accounts, NAS and S3-compatible storage, and backups every few hours.

“Import mail from .mbox files” sheet: four files found (Inbox, Sent and two archive folders, 926.6 MB in total) go into an offline account called “Imported Mail”, backed up to the external disk and Wasabi. — Import .mbox files from Google Takeout, Apple Mail or Thunderbird as an offline account.

Real app screens with demo data: the accounts, messages and amounts are made up.

Why Arca

Three promises it is built on

Your storage, not ours

Arca writes to a disk, NAS or S3-compatible bucket you choose, with your own credentials. We never host a byte of your mail.

An open format

Mail is saved as standard mbox, one file per folder and month, with a JSON manifest. Thunderbird, Apple Mail or MBox Viewer Pro can open it.

Private by design

There is no server of ours in between. Everything runs on your Mac, and passwords stay in the macOS Keychain.

Open by default

A backup you can read without us.

Every message is stored byte for byte, exactly as it arrived. Closed months never change, so they work with versioning and Object Lock on your bucket. Each destination has a README that explains how to open everything without Arca.

Opens with

Thunderbird
Apple Mail
MBox Viewer Pro

Your destination, as Arca leaves it

arca/my-mac/
├── README.txt
├── manifest.json
├── index.sqlite.zst
└── accounts/
    └── ana-gmail-com/
        └── folders/
            ├── all-mail/2026/
            │   ├── 2026-09.mbox
            │   └── 2026-10.mbox
            └── trash/2026/
                └── 2026-10.mbox

How it works

Save. Search. Restore.

Arca backs up on its own in the background and, if it is interrupted, picks up where it left off. When you need something back, you find it and put it back.

Find any message, even ones deleted from the server

Search by subject, sender, recipient or text across every account. Mail deleted on the server stays in your backup, marked as deleted. Previews block remote content.

Put mail back where it belongs

Restore into the same account: messages go to a new folder and nothing on the server is changed. By default only what was deleted comes back, so you get no duplicates. An imported .mbox can be restored into your account too. Migrating between accounts is coming soon to Pro.

Sources and destinations

Works with the mail you already have

Status in the version we're preparing for launch.

Back up from

Any IMAP account
Your hosting, your ISP, cPanel, Dovecot…
In the app
Gmail and Google Workspace
With an app password
In the app
Outlook.com and Microsoft 365
Sign in with Microsoft (IMAP with OAuth)
In the app
Your .mbox files
Google Takeout, Apple Mail, Thunderbird
FreeIn the app
Microsoft Graph
For organisations that block IMAP
ProComing soon
Gmail API
With your own Google Cloud project
ProUnder study

Save to

A disk of your Mac
Internal or external (USB, Thunderbolt)
FreeIn the app
A NAS
A network share mounted on your Mac
ProIn the app
S3-compatible storage
Wasabi, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, Hetzner, AWS…
ProIn the app
Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox
Straight to your cloud drive
ProComing soon
SFTP and FTP
Your own server
ProUnder study

Platforms

Mac
macOS 14 or later, from the Mac App Store
Coming soon
Windows
Same engine and backup format, from the Microsoft Store
Coming soon

Optional encryption · Pro

Coming soon

Encrypt before it leaves your Mac

Encryption is built into Arca's engine and is coming to the app: you'll turn it on when you add a destination. Files are encrypted with age, an open standard, to two keys: one kept in your Mac's Keychain and a recovery key that only you hold. Either key opens your backup, with Arca or with the age command-line tool.

Open it without Arca

$ age -d -i recovery.txt \
    -o 2026-09.mbox 2026-09.mbox.age

Free for one account. Pro when you need more.

Planned launch prices in US dollars; they vary by country with taxes and App Store pricing

Free

One account via IMAP, backed up in full to a disk of your Mac. Includes .mbox import.

Pro · Yearly

from $8.99/yr

NAS and S3 destinations, several at once and more frequent backups; migration between accounts coming soon. 1 to 100 accounts.

Pro · Lifetime

$44.99 once

Everything in Pro for one account. No renewal.

Compare plans

Backups you have already made are never locked, even if you stop paying.

Coming soon

Start with one account, free.

Arca Mail Backup is nearly ready. It's coming to the Mac App Store first (macOS 14 or later) and to the Microsoft Store after that. Leave your email and we'll write once, on launch day.

Coming soon to the Mac App Store
Coming soon to the Microsoft Store