Actually, there has never been a way to backup or export the email account in the first place. I don’t think the contents of email accounts were migrated to premium hosting when email was still available as a feature. That said, with only 10 MB of storage, it wasn’t really possible to use the email accounts for durable message archival.
By now the email server is down, and there is no way to get access to what’s stored on it. It may have been erased and decommissioned. Either the server was put to use for something else, or it was too old and has been scrapped.
Email has always been an afterthought on our service. The tiny amount of storage, tiny sending limits, frequent outages, and problems with the server being listed in many email blocklists meant the service was never really good to begin with.
Three years ago we already decided to sunset it and disable creation of new email accounts. More recently, management of existing accounts was disabled too.
I agree that it would have been better to check who was still using it and notify them that the email server was about to be shut down. But we’ve also not heard a peep about this from iFastNet. We only found out that the email server was getting taken down after it actually went down.