Once again, I’ve decided to switch email clients; this time from The Bat to Gmail, or more specifically, to Google Apps. After some recent issues with The Bat (mostly relating to a recent update), I decided to make another go at switching to Gmail; but this time trying the Google Apps version.
After my last attempt, I was informed that the Google Apps edition of Gmail doesn’t suffer the Sender issue that so plagued me before. After almost a full day of work, the transition is complete. And I couldn’t be happier.
The only downside is the expense – all in all, it cost $78.95 to go through this process. This was spent on two tools that made the process possible:
- Aid4Mail – A key application used for converting the various mail-storage file formats.
- gMOVE – Used for importing PST files into Gmail.
The process itself was simple, once I had found the software I needed, which took some doing. Here’s an overview, and some notes if you happen to try something like this (this assumes that you have Outlook installed).
- Export messages to mailbox format. (If you are moving from Thunderbird this isn’t necessary as it already is stored in that format.)
- Use Aid4Mail to convert the mbox files to PSTs
- Load PSTs into Outlook and cleanup as necessary (remove duplicates, cleanup directory structure)
- Launch gMOVE and use it to import the messages from Outlook to Gmail
There are a couple major differences in this attempt, compared to the last. A few things annoyed me about the way things worked after the last time, not the least of which is that by using Gmail Loader you loose all meaningful timestamps. So you don’t know when a message was sent or received.
gMOVE eliminated that problem. It sends the messages to a special POP3 server, and automatically configures your Gmail account to use it. That way, they can control the timestamps, and set them to what they originally were 1.
So after all is said and done; I think I’m happy with this system; much better than last time. I simply can’t justify using a desktop based email client anymore. It just leaves you too out of touch.
1). There is a security issue here, so I wouldn’t do this with anything containing sensitive information.
Can’t you just setup gmail as an IMAP account in outlook and then drag your old mail into a gmail folder – which will also preserve time stamps.
February 6, 2008, 6:04 pm
You can save all that money by using gmail’s IMAP function. Just set up a gmail IMAP account on your email client (I used thunderbird, but I can’t see why it wouldn’t work with outlook & co) and copy/move your email folder from the local folders to the imap folders on gmail. Preserves timestamps and even other things like ’stars’ and ‘replied’ flags. No conversion of storage formats between different clients necessary.
The folder names you use will even appear in gmail as labels thus further reducing the migration workload. Just be aware that the string length of labels is limited and subfolders will be converted to labels in the parentfolder/subfolder format, ie becomming quite long. Gmail will not execute imap commands that attempt to create such folders.
Another thing worth mentioning is probably that you are mistaken if you think that the ’sender’ issue is solved by using the google apps version of gmail. If you ever set up additional email addresses in one account (in the same way you did in the ‘other’ gmail) the ’sender’ header will again be added with your account address in it.
This a bit less annoying than the original issue (since it is a email@yourdomain.com rather than …@gmail.com address) but still a sucker. I, for example, free lance for a number of different companies and pool all the work related email from all of them in my google apps account, say, jobs@mydomain.com Now these companies expect me to use their corporate email addresses to send email related to their projects and I wish I could send emails without letting anybody too obviously know that I am using a jobs@mydomain.com account to send it. Especially since obviously quite a number of people send email back to that account and not the corporate address there’s supposed to use. Annoying.
February 14, 2008, 12:29 am