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In my opinion, the best way to regularly back up an e-mail account -- so long as it supports IMAP4 -- is by using something a tool such as OfflineIMAP [0] (my preference) or imapsync [1].

Install it, configure it, perform an initial sync, set up a cronjob to have it sync automatically once a day or whatever, and make sure that the local directory it is being sync'd to is included in your regular system backups, then forget about it.

If you're running Linux or macOS, one or both of the above are likely just an "(apt|brew|yum) install" away.

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[0]: https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap

[1]: https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync

https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault

I've used this a few times for terminated employees (back when we were on dummy gmail accounts). It doesn't look like it's been updated in a while, but it still works [0]

0: https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault/issues/343

For Gmail they have Google Takeout:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Takeout

Actually works very well.