Backing up your Gmail just got a whole lot safer. Up until now, the Gmail API only allowed us to pull contacts and the number of unread messages. We couldn’t actually pull email messages. To pull messages for backup, we had to use IMAP, which required us to store your username and password.

In general, we try to avoid storing any username and password info and use Oauth or some similar protocol whenever possible. In situations where we have to store sensitive information, we use strong encryption and security. Today, your Gmail backup got a lot better because Google announced their Oauth access to IMAP/SMTP implementation for Gmail. This means now you can authenticate your Gmail account using Oauth, and we never have to store your email username and password. You can login to Gmail and revoke our access at any time. It gives you more control, which is what we like.

We’ve known this was coming for a while, and have been implementing the solution behind the scenes, waiting for this announcement. We are very excited to be an early adopter of this new change, and want to thank Google for reaching out to us to be involved. We love the forward thinking at Google that is driving the ability to more easily liberate your data from Google services.

So to take advantage of these new changes please login to your Backupify account, go to “Settings” and choose “Gmail.” You can click “Switch to Oauth” or you can delete your current account and login with the new Gmail backup login that says “Add a Gmail Account (XOauth)”. Either one works. Whatever folders you are backing up may have to be re-checked (click save when you are done). For the next few weeks, we will support both methods in case you are slow to transition over, but then we will deprecate the old login method for security reasons and your backups will stop if you don’t re-authenticate with the new Oauth login.

Please tweet this or email it to your friends that use Backupify, as we prefer to convert as many people over as possible before sending out a mass email to the stragglers.  And as always, send questions or leave a comment if something is unclear or if you have any problems.