Can webmails be backup

I am having a problem with a shitty company.

Here's what they say about webmails backup.

"We cannot provide the backups in a readable format, meaning that the backups for the emails can not be read they can only be restored to our server overwriting the current content on the server.

So you will not be able to restore the emails on another server, you can only restore the backups on our server which will overwrite the data in the account currently.".


Is this real or they don't want to give me backup?

You could try asking them to restore them to a new mailbox instead of overwriting the existing one.

Backups may very well be encrypted for security purposes and there only option is to restore a complete backup.

What webmail is that? If it has POP3 or IMAP access, you can download the emails with MS Outlook or similar.