We didn’t come all this way not to back things up! If you hit Skip, then all the messages on your phone will be flagged as already backed up and will be ignored. You’ll be prompted to begin a backup immediately or skip the initial backup.Ĭlick “Backup”. We recommend following their instructions.Ĭhoose your account and grant the requested permissions. Android Police offers a workaround that will let you connect the app to your Gmail through the use of an app-specific password and custom IMAP server settings. Google won’t let you connect third-party apps directly to your account in this way anymore. Update: Google broke this part of the process. The Account Picker on your Android phone will launch, and you’ll be prompted to choose the Gmail account you want to use for backing up your messages. The first step is to set up the connection to your Gmail account. The first screen you’ll see will look like the following: After the application is installed, it’s time to get configuring. Hit up the Google Play Store and download the app.

With our Gmail account IMAP features toggled on, it’s time to install SMS Backup+. Step Two: Install and Configure SMS Backup+ That’s the only configuration you’ll need to do within your Gmail account. Login to your Gmail account and navigate to Settings –> Forwarding and POP/IMAP. Let’s take a moment and hop over to the Gmail account we’re planning on using with the application and check the status. SMS Backup+ requires IMAP access to your Gmail account to function. Step One: Configure Your Gmail Account for IMAP Access However, since it was designed to work with Gmail and works so well with Gmail’s search, threading, and starring functionality, we’re not going to mess with a good thing.

NOTE: Technically, you can dig around the advanced settings of SMS Backup+ to reconfigure it to work with any IMAP-enabled email server. Check the app’s reviews on the Google Play Store to see if the issue has been resolved since then.) This means Google has disabled this process.

A free copy of SMS Backup+ from the Google Play Store ( Update: As of September 14, 2020, Google no longer allows this app to access your Gmail account.

For this tutorial you’ll need three things: Everything from switching phones to fumble fingers can drop your messages in front of the digital reaper-just last night I managed to accidentally delete a massive SMS thread when I really only intended to delete a single message that refused to send.īacking up your SMS messages to your Gmail account is so simple, however, there’s no good reason not to do it.

Access android texts from computer