Switching to Gmail, Again

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 lose 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.

Adam Caudill

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.

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.

Task Management with Tasks

After being reminded of Alex King’s excellent Tasks task management system by a Download Squad article, I decided it was high time to give it a try. I had seen the software before, but never really evaluated it to see if it would be of any real use to me. This time, I gave it a more thorough look. I’ve been doing a fair bit of reading in recent weeks about time and task management; and thus I’m trying to build a better process than what I use now.

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.

TLS: 64bit-ish Serial Numbers & Mass Revocation

During a recent discussion about the DarkMatter CA on a Mozilla mailing list, it was found that their 64-bit serial numbers weren’t actually 64 bits, and it opened a can of worms. It turns out that the serial number was effectively 63 bits, which is a violation of the CA/B Forum Baseline Requirements that state it must contain 64 bits of output from a secure random number generator (CSPRNG). As a result of this finding, 2,000,000 certificates or more may need to be replaced by Google, Apple, GoDaddy and various others.