If your Hostinger mailbox holds client conversations, invoices, or anything else you genuinely can’t afford to lose, this guide covers two things in order: how to actually create a backup of that mail, and how to get it back if you ever need to.
I tested both halves myself, exporting a real mailbox in every available format and then restoring each one back into a live account, and found a real mistake along the way that could leave you with a doubled, messy inbox if nobody warns you about it first.
Here’s the whole process, start to finish, in the order you’d actually go through it.
Why This Isn’t Optional: Hostinger Has No Safety Net of Its Own
I confirmed this directly from their support. If messages are permanently deleted from Trash and you have no export of your own, they are not recoverable in most cases. The one exception is if the mailbox happens to have archived content available, which isn’t something you can count on and isn’t a substitute for keeping your own backup.
There’s also no scheduled or automatic backup feature built into Hostinger Email. Whatever protection your mailbox has is entirely up to you to set up and maintain.
That means the two steps below are the only thing standing between you and a permanently empty inbox if something goes wrong.
With that established, here’s how to actually build that protection.
Part 1: Protecting Your Emails
Choose your backup method
You have two options, and they suit different situations.
Manual export through old Webmail is the most direct method. You select messages in a folder, choose EML, Mbox, or Maildir format, and download the result. I’ve covered the full step-by-step process, including the format differences and a real limit worth knowing (EML only exports one message at a time), in my Hostinger Email export guide, so I won’t repeat every screen here. The short version: it works, it’s manual, and it only covers whatever folder you run it on at the moment you run it.
Syncing through an IMAP client like Thunderbird is the closer thing to an ongoing backup that Hostinger supports. Since there’s no built-in scheduled export, connecting a desktop client that keeps a local copy of your mail is the practical workaround for anyone who doesn’t want to remember to export manually every few weeks.
Once connected, the client’s local profile becomes a de facto backup you control, though you’re responsible for backing up that local profile yourself, the same way you’d back up any other file on your computer.
Decide how often to repeat it
Since neither method runs on its own, you need an actual cadence, not a one-time export you forget about. A reasonable rule of thumb: back up as often as you’d be upset to lose everything since your last export.
For a low-volume personal inbox, once a month is probably enough. For a business mailbox handling client communication or anything with real consequences if lost, monthly is cutting it close, and a Thunderbird sync running continuously in the background is a better fit than relying on your own memory to run a manual export on schedule.
Once you have a backup sitting somewhere safe, whether that’s a downloaded export file or a synced client, the other half of this guide is what to do with it when you actually need it back.
Part 2: Restoring Your Emails
How to restore a backup, step by step
I ran a real restore test using files I’d exported earlier, in old Webmail, reachable directly at mail.hostinger.com/old. Before importing anything, I created separate empty folders for each format I was testing, to keep the results isolated and see whether each one actually worked without guessing.
Here’s the process:
- In old Webmail, select the folder you want to restore into
- Click More, then Import
- A dialog opens explaining you can upload files in MIME (EML) or Mbox format, and that multiple files can be compressed into zip archives
- Click Browse, select your file, and click Import
- The maximum allowed file size is 256MB per import
I tested all three formats, and all three worked without issue:
- Mbox format: imported a zip containing 5 messages. All 5 restored successfully into the target folder.
- Maildir format: imported a zip of the same messages. All 7 messages in that export batch restored successfully.
- EML format: imported a single exported message. It restored as 1 message, exactly as expected, confirming EML behaves the same on the way back in as it does on the way out, one message per file.
Every restored message showed up looking like a normal email in the folder, not as an attachment or a raw file, meaning you can open, reply to, and forward a restored message the same as any other. Restore genuinely works. But where you restore it to matters just as much as how, which is the part most guides skip entirely.
The mistake to avoid: never restore directly into a folder that already has those emails
This is the part that only shows up if you actually test it rather than just describing the click path. I intentionally restored a backup into my live Inbox, one that still contained the original versions of those same messages, just to see what would happen.
The result is that my Inbox went from 6 messages to 12. Every message in the backup got added as a new copy, sitting alongside the originals that were already there.
So the rule is simple: if you’re restoring a backup into a mailbox that still has some or all of those original messages present, whether from a partial loss or just testing your backup like I did, always import into a new, empty folder first.
Review what came in, then manually move only what you actually need into your Inbox or wherever it belongs. Importing directly into a folder that already contains overlapping messages is the fastest way to end up with a cluttered, duplicated mailbox that takes longer to clean up than the restore itself took.
If You Never Backed Up and Something’s Already Gone
Everything above assumes you backed up before you needed to. If you didn’t, and mail has already been permanently deleted from Trash, recovery isn’t something to count on.
Support can check whether the mailbox has any archived content, which occasionally makes recovery possible, but this isn’t a standard safety net you should assume will be there. The realistic takeaway is that the export and import process covered above is the actual protection here, not a fallback support can activate after the fact.
If you haven’t exported anything yet, that’s worth doing today rather than after something goes wrong, and if storage limits are part of what’s pushing you toward backing up regularly, it’s worth checking current Hostinger email pricing and coupon codes before assuming an upgrade is the only fix.
Hostinger’s backup and restore process genuinely works, and I confirmed all three formats restore cleanly with nothing corrupted or lost along the way.
The real risk is restoring into the wrong place and quietly doubling your inbox.
So, back up on a real schedule, always restore into a fresh folder first, and treat your own exports as the only safety net you actually have, since Hostinger won’t recover permanently deleted mail without one.
