From Outlook, to Gmail, to The Bat!

Back in March, I switched from The Bat! to Outlook as a result of being annoyed with using two different clients (work & home)*. So today, I’m running The Bat again, thanks to Gmail.

Moving to Gmail #

I had been thinking about moving to Gmail for a while, the other day I decided to bite the bullet and do it. There was some pain involved, but not as bad as I expected. The process goes something like this:

Setup any custom From address, personally, I had 5. Now, here’s a word of warning: pay close attention to the note on that page, I didn’t, and it bit me quite hard, here’s why.
Setup Filters to Label your email based on the To address, this way you can see what account a message was sent to.
Forward your existing email account to <your_name>@gmail.com.
Convert/Export your email to the mbox format (some clients such as Thunderbird support this natively), for some clients, you may need the help of something like Aid4Mail (this is what I used, works great).
Finally, use Mark Lyon’s Gmail Loader to read the mbox files you just created, and shoot them to your Gmail account. One note on this, it sends one email every two seconds, assuming no errors, so if you have several thousand emails, this is a slow process.

Once you’ve completed those 5 steps, you’re done.

Now, there are some things to keep in mind, if you don’t want people to see your Gmail address via that custom From address, well, you’re out of luck. Google sends a Sender header with your Gmail address. This results in a number of issues, but the most painful for me was in Outlook displaying something like this:

“From @gmail.com on behalf of @example.com”

As far as I’m concerned, that’s about the most unprofessional thing a business email could display. It reeks of uncaring attitudes and oozes the impression of fraud. I use my email for business, so that isn’t an option.

Thankfully, I noticed this before it caused too much embarrassment, but it’s a death-nail for any user that needs mobile business email.

Moving to The Bat! #

Thankfully I was only using Gmail full-time for around a day, so I don’t have to fight the battle of getting my email back from Google**. Thanks to the import features of The Bat, I moved my 15,000 or so emails over from Outlook 2007 in less than an hour. All told I spent around 50 hours importing email, setting up filters and cleaning up on Gmail; for The Bat!, that same task took less than three hours, and that includes setting up several fairly complex filters.

After a year using Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003, then one whole day with Gmail as my primary mail client, I’m glad to be back with The Bat!. The lag that so annoyed me with Outlook is finally gone. Everything it does is fast.

I wanted a real web-based solution, and the best candidate failed. Now I’m back to a desktop client, but one that offers better performance and more flexibility than Outlook can provide.

Truth be told, I believe I was just frustrated with the lack of flexibility that Outlook has compared to The Bat!, and since I couldn’t avoid Outlook, I axed The Bat.

** Has anyone noticed that Gmail has no easy or even reasonable way to get your email out of the system? Locking users in seems odd for a company that promises to not be evil.

Adam Caudill

HP Folio 13

When Intel and various industry partners started talking about “ultra-books” as competition against Apple and tablets, I was more than a little skeptical. Ultra-books are small and light weight – but not cheap (average price being around $1,000) and rather underpowered compared to what you can get for the same money with a more traditional laptop (they are basically MacBook Air knock-offs). I had written them off almost as soon as they were announced.

I Love My Job

I love what I do, and I work with a great team. While it’s still far from perfect; I can say that I do love my job. For the last couple weeks though, I’ve had to remind myself of this several times. I’m sure we’ve all done it, in this industry it’s hard to avoid. You read an email or receive a phone call and repeat the mantra “I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.

Checklist: Starting a Security Consulting Firm

Recently a friend of mine asked for input on what would be needed to launch a new security consulting company, to help him out I drafted a detailed list of what would need to be done for a successful launch. Here is an expanded version of that list, hopefully others will find this useful as well. This isn’t the simplest route to setting up a new business, but is intended to set the business up for long-term success.

30 Days of Brave

Brave is a web browser available for multiple platforms that aims to provide additional security and privacy features – plus a novel monetization scheme for publishers. I gave it 30 days to see if it was worth using. I switched on all platforms I use to give it a fair shot, I normally use Chrome which made the switch less painful, though the results were very much mixed. There are some things I honestly liked about it, some things I really disliked, and at least one thing that just made me mad.

on Unfair Judgement

Recently I was leaving a store after doing some Christmas shopping, as I entered my car someone recognized me and waved – this is the story of what went through my mind in that moment, the mistakes it revealed, and the regret that went with it. For those that are here in hopes of an article on information security or development, please pardon the interruption; this is about human nature. I know the value of your time so I try to diverge from my normal topics as little as possible, but this incident was striking enough that I thought it worthy of publication.