Subscribe in a readerHow to upload all your old archived Email to Gmail from outlook, lotus notes, and unix (pine)
Over the last few weeks I have slowly been uploading all my old archived email to Gmail going back to 1995. Over the years I have been forced lucky to use several fine email clients (Pine on Unix, Outlook, Lotus Notes, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail). I am currently pretty comfortable with Gmail and have been using it since it was released. Like many people I am a data pack-rat and have kept all my email files (well, almost all - sadly I discovered I’m missing about 6 months of precious gossip, spam, and banter). My vision is to put it all into Gmail so I can leverage the great search and tagging features they provide.
For the full details and step by step instructions, keep reading.
I am also going to keep a local copy in Thunderbird so I can write some visualization plug-ins , reports etc using my email as data (I’ll save that for later). I also want to get all my old chat history from ICQ, Yahoo IM, Sametime, and AIM uploaded to google (also for a later post).
First lets get the mail into Gmail. Here is the over all process - you will notice that I installed a email server on my computer called Mercury. This lets me set up a IMAP and POP account locally that I can connect to all these clients and move the mail without losing any dates or other info.
For the full details including all the steps, keep reading.
Step 1) The first thing I did was dig through all my old hard drives and consolidate my mail into one location. As you can see, I have outlook (pst) files, lotus notes (nsf) files and files from an old unix (pine) account I had at school. The zip file is the a copy of the finished product that has all my email consolidated (2006 and 2007 are in gmail already.
I know - there is a lot of overlap, better safe than sorry…besides, you can delete the duplicates once they are in Thunderbird using an extension.
Step 2. Download Software
- Thunderbird (free email client) - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
- Mercury (free email server) - ftp://ftp.usm.maine.edu/pegasus/mercury32/m32-452.exe (read about it)
- Lotus Notes (free trial) - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/downloads/
- Outlook (free trial) - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/default.aspx
Why Thunderbird - because it is open source with a large developer base. This means there is a good set of tutorials for writing extensions if I to want later on (for those visualizations). Also, I’m making a long term bet that 50 years from now, there will still be tools that import these files - (since they are just text files with no encoding and no database) - plus Thunderbird is really fast and can read 6gb of email quickly (lotus notes and outlook tend to slow down). So Thunderbird will be the final destination on my computer and I will upload from there.
Step 3. Install software
- Thunderbird - just default everything
- Mercury - Make sure you set it up for both POP and IMAP when you get those options in the wizard
- Lotus Notes - Default
- Outlook - Default
Step 4. Import Unix files to Thunderbird
These are the easiest because Thunderbird will read these natively. All you have to do is copy the files in to the local folder and reopen Thunderbird.
A) Find out where thunderbird is storing your local files. To do this go to Tools > Account Settings. (note I renamed the local account to Ben Shoemate (all mail) but what your interested in is the “Local Directory” copy that and go there in windows explorer. This is where you need to copy the unix files (they are files with no extensions). Just copy them to this “local folder”, close and restart Thunderbird. Your old mail will be there! That’s it!
Step 5. Set up a local Email account in Mercury.
Open Mecury - if it is all ready running you will see down in the windows toolbar by the clock.
Otherwise , Start > Program Files > etc..
Once Mecury is open, go to Confirguration > Manage Local Users > Add User
Because there is so much mail, I am going to set up a different local account per year. Gmail.com can import from 5 accounts at a time, and this will save a lot of time later on. So just make up an account name - I use my intials and the year and a simple password.
It should look like this when your done.
Each of these accounts are real email addresses. When you are local (in lotus notes and outlook) you can map to them with bs1999@localhost
In gmail, you can add them as bs1999@youripaddress (i.e. bs1999@111.111.122.11).
Step 6. Lotus Notes NSF files to IMAP
Once lotus notes is installed, you can simply double click the nsf files to open them, or you can click File > Database > Open > browse
You should see your old mail now. Ahh the memories….But don’t stop to read everything again or I’ll never finish this tutorial!
Now, in lotus notes we are going to map to the local email account you set up in mercury. (Note: Gmail now has IMAP so you could just map directly to gmail if you want using the same procedure).
Go to File > Preferences > Client Reconfiguration Wizard (isn’t it soooo intutive, that’s why I love lotus notes)
Check Pop or IMAP and click next.
Select IMAP, enter your new email account you set up in mercury, and type localhost, click next.
enter your account name again, and enter the password you gave yourself.
Click next, enter localhost as the server and your email address again - this doesn’t matter since you will not be using this email address for very long and it won’t show up on any of the mail that goes through it.
next, next, next your done.
To open the view of this in notes, click the “Databases” icon on the left panel and open your new account (this might take 2-3 minutes while notes creates a new nsf file etc.)
Now you should have you local account open. Now simply open the old nsf file, go to the “all documents” folder, select all, copy (I think it will only let you copy 2500 at a time) and then switch to you new email account and paste. Once you have all the messages for that year in the local IMAP account, close the nsf and repeat for all nsf files, and all years.
Step 7 - Outlook to IMAP
The same as in lotus notes - open your pst, then add the imap account and copy and paste.
- To open the pst go to File > Manage Data files and click Add.
- To open the local IMAP account go to Tools > Account Settings > New email account
Check the box that says “Manually configure server settings”.
- Select Internet Mail
- Enter your Name, Email address (bs1999@localhost) and password, select IMAP, the server is localhost for both incoming and outgoing
Once you have mapped to this account, simply copy your old mail from the PST to the new account.
Step 8 - Clean it up in Thunderbird
Map the account to Thunderbird and download all your mail. Just like in outlook and lotus notes, we are going to add an account to Thunderbird and let it download all the mail you put in from lotus notes, pine and outlook.
- Open Thunderbird
- Click Tools > Account Settings > Add Account
- Enter Account Name (for me its bs1999@localhost), Name, email address (bs1999@localhost)
- Click Server settings
- Click OK.
- The next thing I did was organize copy them down into my local Thunderbird account and used an extension to delete duplicates
- Then I spent some time looking for gaps…oh well
Step 9 - Upload to gmail
By now your local account is getting a lot of mail. Let’s start pulling it into gmail. I set up a new gmail account to test it first. From there I can pull it into my main account.
- Log in to gmail
- Click Settings > Accounts > Get Mail from other accounts (Pop3) > Add other accounts
- Add your accounts from your local account. Note: you need you IP address. If you have a router you will need to route ports for pop3 (port 110) to your local computer. Log into your router to do this. While your there, get the IP of your router (ITS NOT the one that starts with 192. or 10. those are always local addresses)
(that’s NOT my IP address btw)
Next - gmail gives you some great options to tag the mail as it comes in, do it. Even if your not a tagger - do it.
You might also want to leave the message on the server (your computer) if this is a trial run.
Click Add account. If you get a problem, make sure your firewall is open, you port is mapped, and your password is right.
Next I’ll show you how to upload all those old chats…
Posted in Email, Guides, Information Architecture, Social Networks, Web Software, google
November 11th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
[...] do routine back-ups. As I was going through all my old hard drives as part of my email project to upload all my email into Gmail. I took note of the various ways I organized my files over the years, the various folder structures [...]
November 13th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
[...] that I have all my old email in one place, my next side project will be to create some visualizations to start analyzing it. What do I mean? [...]
November 15th, 2007 at 4:16 am
You can use imap.google.com instead of all this. You just copy the emails to gmail in your outlook.
November 25th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Agreed with knyttv… if your client is capable of IMAP communication, (I am using Outlook 2003 in Exchange mode), then pushing your archive items into a PST, then uploading them in IMAP mode to Gmail seems to be working great.
I consolidated a bunch of old PSTs into a new one, then built a new Outlook profile to connect to gmail instead of the exchange server. I made the archive PST in the exchange profile the dominant PST in the IMAP mode, then dragged and copied the folders upto gmail…
gmail automatically tags them with the name of the PST folder, and preserves all the header information.
November 29th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
[...] 4) Upload to Gmail with IMAPI already wrote about this earlier.Step 5) Tag as chat - When you import them to gmail, make sure you have gmail tag auto tag the mail [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 6:51 am
RH and knyttv, could you explain a little more how to import the Outlook mail into Gmail?
January 19th, 2008 at 7:47 am
[...] fetch through through your local email server, Ben Shoemate wrote a long blog entry on this method here. Some of the problems I experienced with this method is firewalls interfering the whole time, [...]
January 20th, 2008 at 5:46 am
[...] Erre kínált megoldást ez a blog bejegyzés itt! [...]
January 23rd, 2008 at 8:30 am
Hmm hope someone’s still reading this. I’m trying to get my old lotus files into a format so I can upload to GMAIL. All the steps for going from Lotus to Mercury work until I try to configure the client using the wizard in lotus it seem to go okay but when i click on the new icon it creates I get a Error logging into server localhost: you must emable the Notes TCPIP port. Checking the notes client that ports show enabled.
Any suggestions?
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:09 am
Scott - if notes was set up to connect to your vpn or work network, it might have settings that put it on wrong network. Try going to File > Edit current location > Ports, and make sure TCP/IP is checked. Also try disabling your firewall.
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:10 am
Rudolf, Google has a good tutorial on this on their website - you want to add your gmail as an IMAP account and then select all your old messages and copy and paste them into gmail. IMAP lets you move the messages back and forth - folders in outlook before tags in gmail, delete it in outlook, and it is deleted in gmail, and move it in outlook, from one pst to another, and it is added to outloook.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77661&topic=12814
January 24th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Hey Ben well I’ve made it as far as I have everything into Thunderbird, used the extension to delete duplicates and am trying to get Gmail to find me so as to fetch my email. Keep getting timed out messages from Gmail. I have it pointed to my public address just like you do with my thunderbird email account up, mercury running as well. I’ve logged into my router and specified for the machine I’m on to allow pop in on port 110. I’ve bounced the router, still timing out back at Gmail end.
Any thoughts?
January 24th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Scott - you have 2 options:
1) add you gmail account to thunderbird as an IMAP account (you might try setting up a new gmail account so you don’t endanger your normal one) then in thunderbird move the messages to the gmail account.
2) if your running mercury, test the connection by sending an email from gmail to your local account @your ip address
gmail will sent the information to you public ip address, your router should forward it to your computer, then mercury should take the email and stick in your inbox…if this doesn’t work then you might have the wrong port forwarded in your router. POP3 is port 110, imap is port 143
January 30th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Ben,
It was my anti-virus program doing it. Got it stopped now Thanks again!!!
January 30th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Great - glad to hear its working for you finally. Make sure you watch your storage limit in gmail - i bought the extra 10gb since my email now sits at 5.3gb of 16.2gb (there is an upgrade link at the bottom of the page in gmail). When I first did this they only had 4gb for free, looks like now it is up to 6.2gb for free.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Ben,
One other thing I encountered I thought I’d document to you for use in
your blog in case someone else runs into it. While copying email over
from my old notes file to the new notes account I’d occasionally get
this message, “Function Not Implemented by the Internet Messaging”
When I finally narrowed it down to which messages were creating this
error I found out they were invitations to meetings. So I deleted all
of them in my various email files and everything proceeded without a
hitch.
Hope that saves someone some headaches.
February 14th, 2008 at 2:26 am
Seems to be working - this is ingenious! Nice thinking!
February 19th, 2008 at 3:53 am
lotus notes import pst file…
…
February 24th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
I have recently tried a number of ways of moving my email into my Gmail account with various different tools and methods.
The most successful method I found is to:-
1) Configure Outlook 2003 (where the majority of my email resides) with an IMAP connection to my Gmail account.
2) Create two ‘Favourite’ folders, one to my Gmail inbox and another to Gmail Sent Mail (simply for ease of use)
3) Open the .PST file that contains the email I’d like to move into Gmail.
4) Select a bunch of emails you’d like to end up in your Gmail Inbox (try with 20 or so to start with)
5) Drag the selected emails onto the Inbox and wait…. Outlook will gather it’s thoughts and then move the items from the Inbox into Gmail’s Inbox
6) Check your Gmail Inbox to see the email sitting there in all their glory..
7) To move the Sent mail it’s exactly the same as above but ensure you move it to your ‘Sent Mail’ folder unlike me as I moved a bunch of Sent mail into my Gmail inbox
Another trick I recently used to get my email from an old Gmail account into my new Gmail account was to:-
1) Setup my old Gmail account with IMAP access
2) Connect Outlook to this IMAP account
3) Now I have both old and new Gmail accounts setup in Outlook
4) Drag and drop the emails from one IMAP account to another! ; )
5) Hey - presto - mobile email retaining date stamps and header information
NOTES:
I’ve not moved a high volume of mail as yet but moving a small amount takes a while, so tread carefully when attempting to move lots of mail, it maybe worth removing unnecessary attachments first.
I find it useful to have Task Manager open with the Networking tab to view network traffic as Outlook appears to be Not Responding during the moving of mail
This has worked for me okay so far, I’ve plenty more to move and will post further notes if i find anything else.
February 25th, 2008 at 11:37 am
I have found:-
http://www.google.com/enterprise/gallery/apps/migration.html
These may help.
February 28th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Hey Ben. Although this looks to be quite the process for me, I wanted to run a few questions by you before I spend an afternoon/evening working on this.
1) I use Outlook Express, not Outlook. What are the adjustments I will need to make to get this transfer to go smoothly?(Keeping original time stamps AND being able to meta-tag emails going into Gmail are VERY important to me) Should I just install Outlook (.pst files) and move everything there instead, or can I avoid this step by moving mail directly from OE (.dbx files) to Thunderbird.
2) What will the final requirements be? I just have mail from Outlook Express (is a Hotmail account) to move. Will I need Mercury and Thunderbird with OE, or just Thunderbird with OE, or perhaps Thunderbird and Outlook.
March 7th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
[...] Ben Shoemate » How to upload all your old archived Email to Gmail from outlook, lotus notes, and un… (tags: gmail email outlook archive imap sync google pst import mac howto backup) [...]
March 9th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
I never heard from Ben, but I wanted to let everyone else know who reads this blog, that if you use Outlook Express, you can move all email to GMail very easily! I could have skipped ALL this. Here are the steps:
1) Goto Gmail.com, Settings, Make sure IMAP is enabled, then click on “Configuration Instructions.” Select Outlook Express and Read!
2) Follow instructions for Outlook Express! Drag/Drop your email!
That’s it! Header information (dates, etc) are all transferred. If you set up folders, they act as GMail Labels too! So you can label as you drag and drop if you drop email into a specific folder (or just create a folder in Outlook Express). AMAZING!
March 11th, 2008 at 3:58 am
Thank you a lot Ben, I’ve been able to import my Outlook 2007 mails in my Google Apps GMail account, using Mercury/32 IMAP server and configuring my router to forward port 110 to my computer.
The sole annoyment is that sent mail I imported are considered received mails in GMail and I can’t force them to be moved to the Sent folder.
Thanks for your tutorial!
But now I read Chris comment from March 9th, 2008 and I think why would I’ve not simply configure IMAP directly between Outlook 2007 and GMail like described in that Help article: https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77689
March 27th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Hi Ben,
Thanks for the fantastic tutorial. I successfully moved over several old Lotus Notes archives from my old job into Gmail. Even the conversations are linked together Gmail style!
My only problem is this. Within Gmail, looking at my Inbox (under any label or All Mail) all the mail is listed with the date I moved the files over. WITHIN each email the date information is accurate, it is just the inbox view where the dates are wrong. But that means I cannot sort my 5 years worth of mail in chronological order.
Any suggestions for remedying this? I would delete and re-import the mail if needed.
Thanks!
Lindsay
March 27th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Lindsay -
Hmm…Once its in gmail I don’t know how to change the dates. But you could do a search and delete them then reimport them (just search for your old work address in the “to” field and delete everything). Then you can try mapping from lotus notes directly to you Gmail with IMAP.
To do this open lotus notes and create a new inbox that point to gmail via imap. You should see your gmail emails start to appear there (or set up a new gmail account to import to first).
Then open your work email (in lotus notes), select all the messages and copy them then go to the gmail inbox (in lotus notes) and paste them (now wait a long time for lotus notes to move all the messages). The should have the correct dates in gmail now.
March 27th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Thank you for your quick reply. I should have specified, that IS what I did. I connected directly to Gmail just as you describe because I did not have any other types of accounts to deal with.
On the Lotus Notes side, viewing the Gmail inbox, all the dates are correct. But on the Gmail side they are incorrect. I can’t imagine why.
March 27th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Okay, just found this at Gmail’s Help Center:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=82365&topic=12922
Incorrect dates on uploaded messages:
Messages uploaded or copied into Gmail using IMAP may display the wrong date in your inbox or other labels. The correct dates should appear in conversation view.
This is a known issue, and we appreciate your patience as we work to resolve it.
March 27th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Is it an old version of lotus notes maybe?…you can try downloading a newer version (the link to the trial is in my post) or… if you really want those dates fixed (which I did, not very important but its a ego/data integrity thing for me - since it will be that way forever) Then you can use the Mercury method - its a pain but it works, like I said, I can open email from 1994 in gmail now and on rare occasions that has been useful.
March 27th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Ohh - right- which is why I imported them using POP3! That’s why I used Mercury to create a local email account.
March 27th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
So we have come full circle! :o) And it was back in November you went throught this? So the question is how long to live with the situation in the hopes that Google is actually addressing it before I give up and spend another 48 hours following your original instructions…
Anyway, thanks very much again Ben!
March 27th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Well, I really doubt they will fix all the old email that are already imported but I could be wrong. I imagine they will fix the it for anyone that imports after this point…but you never know with Google. They surprise me all the time by doing the right thing.
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:57 am
This tutorial and the follow up discussion has been incredibly helpful. Like many other people here I am an email pack-rat and it will be great to get everything in one (searchable) place.
I’ve been using the gmail account imap’d into Outlook to drag and drop Outlook folders into gmail and copy the messages over (I don’t trust “move” yet). The problem is — not all the messages are copied over.
I can’t provide the error message at the moment because Outlook is tied up attempting another copy operation, but it essentially says the copy failed for some reason, perhaps the imap connection went away. The connection appears to be fine, it is simply that all the messages are not copied. For example, I have some folders with 3000+ messages in them and only 1500-2100 (or so) of them actually copy over.
Has anyone else had this problem? I’m stumped.
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:02 am
Right - IMAP only lets you do so many at a time and is problematic
about the dates. That is why I used the POP3 method in the article. If
you set up your own email server (mercury) locally you can save
yourself a lot of headaches. It takes longer to set up but it goes a
lot faster. Since you can import the messages locally really fast in
mecurcy, then set up google to pull them over time. I let it run over
the coarse of 2 days. An it had them all, correct dates and all.
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:47 am
Follow up to post above:
The error message I receive is ” Can’t copy the items. The copy operation could not be completed. It is possible that the destination server is unavailable or does not support subfolders. “
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:50 am
Sorry about the extra post, Ben. I should have refreshed the page before replying to my own message.
Thanks for the info! I think I’ll wipe out what I have done so far and use your method with Mercury this weekend.
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:56 am
Its worth it - I moved 10 years worth. I had to do the copy and paste - but since I was moving to mercury, I was able to do my whole folder at a time and much faster (since the server and the client were both on my laptop) then connect Gmail to your local account using your ip address and let google pull them in with pop3. It will take about a day…I moved about 45,000 messages and thats after deleting spam and ham (the email you asked for but didn’t need like updates from netflix telling me my movie shipped).
April 8th, 2008 at 5:52 am
[...] [...]
April 9th, 2008 at 8:00 am
I think I found an even easier way to do this, now that Gmail is IMAP capable. Try this:
http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=157
Later
C
April 9th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
[...] this is a band-aid. The real solution would be to import his email from Outlook Express into Gmail and get him to use Gmail full time. Heck, then he wouldn’t even need Norton Anti-virus since [...]
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:02 pm
I recently transferred all of my emails to gmail and had the same problem with some (but not all) of the dates. I *believe* that the problem is that some of the messages have a “sent date”, some have a “received date”, and some have both. If the message does not have a “received date”, then Gmail inserts the upload date into the “received date” field, and that is what appears in the mailbox view (but not, for some reason, the detailed view). Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out a fix for this yet. Anyone know how to copy the “sent date” and insert it as the “received date” for 5000 emails?
May 4th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
To me, the bigger challenge is how to de-dupe all of my email archives without going through 50,000 messages manually. I saved off plenty of PST and NSF (and ccmail!) archives over the years but I know they contain dupes aplenty.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
to remove dupes try this, Ive used this and found it invaluable, just install, select the folders and it does the rest.
http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/duplicate_remover/
May 11th, 2008 at 10:23 am
I have copied with IMAP from Outlook Express to gmail according to the information of # 23. Thank you! That was great advice.
My question: Do I have to recreate every single folder (I have loads …) in gmail? Or is it possible to copy both folders and messages from OE to gmail?
May 14th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
[...] email I’ve had; I’ve lost thousands and thousands from old dead hard drives. I found this article on uploading ALL of your old mail to gmail, including old outlook PST files and yahoo accounts [...]
May 28th, 2008 at 7:03 am
I found your tutorial, REALLY interesting, and it’s a very elegant solution to merge several sources.
In my case, I just have one source to export: Lotus Notes… This is what I did. I tried first to export to Outlook with Transend, without success, so I exported first to Outlook Express and then with the import wizard import it to Outlook. That worked fine, but I have some special character issues (á, é, ó, ö, ñ).
Anyway I decided to continue from that point to do some tests. I found a tool called Google Email Uploader, but it *just* seems to work with google apps, (not with normal gmail accounts). I used, with a google apps account, and I have like 175 messages dropped because of RFC messaging formatting issues, but worked quite fine.
I found out the dates issue, for instance: an original message from 07/Nov/07, was uploaded as 08/Nov/07… This might be a serious problem, since I wouldn’t be able to follow the dates. I read that this should be fixed with Mercury/Pop solution (I will try it).
My major concern is that I would like to do this as an incremental process. I would like to upload emails every month or so on. I have several folders in my Notes client, and monthly there are new mails on each folder. It would be possible to do this incrementally? How?
Thank you very much in advance, and congratulations on your tutorial, It has been very helpfull!
May 28th, 2008 at 10:07 am
I think you could set this up for incremental uploads. Once you have Mercury (it is an email server running on your computer) and you create a local account on it, you can add the mercury account as an IMAP account to lotus notes, then add the same account as an POP on gmail. Gmail will automatically pull any new messages that get added to your local email account. So all you have to do, is periodically copy and paste messages (you can select 100s at a time) in lotus notes from you main email account or archive folders, into the local mercury account. So in other words, lotus notes shows two accounts - your work account and all the folders with that, and your imap local mercury account. If you move messages from one to the other, gmail will pick them up. You might look at rules in lotus notes to either forward new messages directly to gmail (that’s what I do) or rules to save them to the folder.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Thanks for your comments!
By the way, what happens with the folder-label mapping with Mercury?
Folders are going to be automatically mapped to labels? Dates issues should be solved with the Mercury-Pop technique, right?
I will try to forward the ports from a Linux box to the Windows-Mercury box, cos I don’t dare to leave a Windows directly to the internet hehehehehe…
May 28th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
The best way to map folders to labels is to configure gmail to assign a label to everything it imports from a given folder - see the gmail account setup page when you first add the account to gmail. Then move 1 folder, then change the label that is applied, and move the next folder. Not the best, but the best I found. Actually, I just imported everything then used filters to apply labels. Search for terms like names and apply labels. Gmail has such awesome search though that folders - or labels are not as necessary as they were in outlook or lotus notes with its pathetic search.
June 26th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I’m trying to do this on a Mac from Apple Mail (the emails were originally from AOL actually, but I’ve gotten them into Mail using the AOL Service Assistant, to get them out of AOL’s proprietary mailbox format that nothing works with). It seems that Mercury is a Windows-only program, so I’m wondering if you or anyone have some advice as to how I could accomplish the same thing on a Mac? Thanks!
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:50 pm
I followed Chris’s instructions (March 9 2008):
I never heard from Ben, but I wanted to let everyone else know who reads this blog, that if you use Outlook Express, you can move all email to GMail very easily! I could have skipped ALL this. Here are the steps:
1) Goto Gmail.com, Settings, Make sure IMAP is enabled, then click on “Configuration Instructions.” Select Outlook Express and Read!
2) Follow instructions for Outlook Express! Drag/Drop your email!
That’s it! Header information (dates, etc) are all transferred. If you set up folders, they act as GMail Labels too! So you can label as you drag and drop if you drop email into a specific folder (or just create a folder in Outlook Express). AMAZING!
I did the IMAP settings in Google and Outlook Express, but I’m not sure about Copying and pasting email into gmail. I have 1000’s of emails, so I don’t want to be pasting all those emails individually. I just could not Drag and Drop the emails! Once I go to OE, my browser is minimized. Even if I have browser window and OE side to side, i can’t sem to Drop the emails. Where do I drop the emails in gmail?
Thanks
July 31st, 2008 at 7:30 pm
This is awesome, thanks for the demo. I did however need a little bit more detail. I use Thunderbird and I seek to migrate everything to my Gmail account. The only step that got me stumped was installing mercury. How do I “step 3: installing software … Make sure you set it up for both POP and IMAP when you get those options in the wizard”?
August 10th, 2008 at 6:38 am
the imap way is a easy way, but what if you have 100,000 emails. that would tak a looong time as i found out.i upgraded my gmail to 400GB. ill never go hotmail again!
August 20th, 2008 at 4:24 am
I have dynamic IP so how can I set up Mercury server??
September 29th, 2008 at 6:56 am
@Ben: This is a very nice solution, specially for those of us with limited upload bandwidth. Setting up everything locally first, then leaving your computer turned on for a few days with Gmail pulling messages via POP at its own pace (and retrying at the inevitable fails) is much better than moving thousands of messages by hand via IMAP and worrying all the time about timeouts and disconnects. Thanks for sharing!
PS.: Any news on transferring chats? I’d love to send some of my old ICQ conversation to my Gmail account.
@Ana: you can use a service such as DynDNS.org (which I use), No-IP.com or many others. With them, you get a subdomain name (such as “yourname.dyndns.org”) that always points to your dynamic IP address. But how it works? Well, many consumer-grade hardware firewalls support these services. You fill your username and password somewhere in its configuration screen, and they’ll start sending your new IP address to the service whenever it changes, what in turn keeps your subdomain pointing to the right place. Alternatively, if your firewall doesn’t support this feature, or if you don’t use one, you can install a small software that sits in your tray and does the same. End result: in step 9, instead of writing “bs1999@70.241.139.3″, you’d write something like “bs1999@yourname.dyndns.org”.
That’s the theory, at least. I’m going to try it myself in a few days, but it’s 99.9% certain it’ll work as expected.
October 15th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
USe-reading dbx files,program keeps all messages, contacts and attachments in the same file in spite of the fact, that it may be dangerous,works with corrupted files, that were damaged by any reason,safe to open files of dbx format, even when your mailbox is infected of seriously damaged as a result of power failure,extracts all messages as separate files in eml format, if you’d like to modify the path to output folder, that is set by default, it can be done with Choose Save Folder function.