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I thought I should post the results of my experiments in the hope that it might assist others.

First of all Gmail, since Ben's original post there's an additional way to set up the POP fetching. Under “Accounts and import” there is now also a button called “Import mail and contacts”. This one appears to do the same thing as the “Add POP3 email account”.

At one point when the accounts I had set up using the “Add POP3 email account” kept failing I had more luck with the “Import mail and contacts” method. There appears to be no difference between them judging by their settings but for some reason the import method worked for me.

As for how I did it after numerous failed attempts (set out above in the comments) here's what I did.

I simply started over. First I deleted all IMAP accounts in Thunderbird, leaving only my Local Folders of downloaded emails. Then I deleted the users in Mercury and the accounts I had set up in Gmail. I did not, however, uninstall and reinstall.

When I created the accounts again in Thunderbird, I changed the account names to ensure – paranoically – that there was no “corruption” left somewhere in the system which would jinx the new setup. Likely an overkill but oh well.

I made the Thunderbird accounts as simple as possible. The year was the name of each account, a simple password. I was a bit paranoid in that I, in step three of Thunderbird's account setup, which defaults to POP3, unticked the checkbox about using a global inbox, before selecting the IMAP radio button. It likely had no effect at all.

One thing that needs to be understood is that the messages can only be pulled from an IMAP inbox. This means that you need to ensure that all your messages are in an inbox in Thunderbird. I say “an” inbox because obviously you can create several accounts to make use of Gmail's 5-account multi-tasking. As long as messages are in the inboxes of the accounts they will (or should) be pulled from the account.

I expected Gmail to group the messages – at least to the best of its abilities – in conversations after upload. For this reason I copied _all_ messages of a relevant year _regardless_ of which folder within Thunderbird's Local Folders (Sent, my various personal folders etc) they were originally in.

After having added all accounts in Thunderbirds I added the corresponding users in Mercury. Then I clicked each (still empty) IMAP mailbox in Thunderbird which brought up the login prompt for Mercury. I logged in and saved each password. I wanted to be sure that the client-server connection worked before starting to copy all the messages from the Local Folders account to the IMAP accounts' inboxes. In some cases the connection didn't work but that was because I had typed too fast and made mistakes when typing the passwords into Mercury's user creation panel or in Thunderbird's accounts panel.

Only after I had ensure that the connection was OK did I copy the messages into the IMAP folders. That took a while on my slow old PC.

After having created the accounts in Gmail the upload started. I really did not do anything different from what Ben described but suddenly – after having recreated everything – it worked. One thing to note – my PC is slow and as a result I often had to type in the POP password for each account two or three times because Mercury would time out.

The intervals at which Gmail checks the POP accounts are random. Sometimes it's every few minutes and sometimes there's half an hour between the pulls. There is sometimes a “Check now” button next to eah POP account, but not always. Gmail also limits each pull to 198-200 messages.

But after 24 hours of uploading all my messages were in Gmail.

A note on tagging. For each POP account I made in Gmail I created a year tag. When everything was working, however, I added an “upload” tag which I assigned to all uploaded messages before removing the “year” tags.

It turns out that Gmail groups messages pretty well. Not exactly sure if this is only based on the Subject but in any event most of my messages ended up as conversations. Nice.

There is one thing to remember regarding Gmail's conversation view: the number of messages that you'll eventually see will not match the number of messages you've had in Thunderbird/uploaded. It's pretty obvious but easily forgotten.

Unfortunately Gmail offers no way (that I know of) of counting individual emails so there's no simple way of verifying within Gmail that everything's been uploaded.

Those were my observations. Hope it helps some.
/p

My only other thought is that maybe I don't have my correct IP address. I found the number on whatismyipaddress.com. That ought to tell you a lot about my tech level!

I've been running into trouble trying to upload several years of Outlook messages into Gmail. I've tried the drag-and-drop method within Outlook (from my local to Gmail IMAP) and am getting the date problems as well as others. So I'm trying to get this to work.

I'm trying to follow the Shoemate Method, but have been encountering the same error message as arthurpjohnson. Outlook doesn't connect to my localhost account.

I suspect that my installation/setup of Mercury was incorrect. I wasn't sure what options to choose during the Wizard. For example, am I supposed to choose the MercuryC or MercuryS STMP server?

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2. Split the roles: It is very important to chalk out what each of you is going to do. Divide your roles and responsibilities. Chart out an activity plan for the work day that keeps you from stepping on each other’ s toes. Typically, in small businesse…

-Isaac

The only problem I ran into was that occassionaly, some of the messages wouldn't get fetched from my local server into Gmail. I knew which ones these were because I had unchecked “Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server” in the Gmail settings. As a result, all successfully imported e-mails would disappear from the inbox of that year's account. Messages that failed to import (for whatever reason) remained in Outlook Express, but they would be marked as unread. To get these failed messages to import, I marked them as unread (in Outlook Express) and manually told Gmail to fetch from the account again. Usually this would solve the problem and they would get pulled. If, however, they still weren't fetched, I moved the problematic e-mails from my local server to a temporary local folder I created in Outlook Express. Then I moved those e-mails BACK INTO the Mercury mail server (by moving them in Outlook Express). Again, I told Gmail to fetch from the account and this time they would always go through. I knew because they would then disappear as expected.

I hope this helps somebody who wants to tranfer Outlook Express e-mails into Gmail.

-Isaac

Will definitely try it on a new account before trying on my real one. (Though I eventually want this all on my primary gmail account).

I should have added one point to my original post – the whole point in me doing this is to move to IMAP so I can access my email (through outlook) on multiple machines. Thus, won't IMAP automatically download all mail from gmail? (I run in offline mode, having a local copy of all mail makes it run faster and is a backup if, god forbid, google goes down).

What is your thought on deleting everything in gmail and starting from scratch? (I have a local copy of all my gmail). The only issue I see is the volume of data – I'll be uploading about 5GB to gmail through your process and then both my desktop and laptop would each have to download 5GB through IMAP. Is that a problem?

Interestingly, James Fallows recently wrote a blog about this problem: jamesfallows.theatlantic.com (He went with the IMAP drag and drop approach). The market seems ripe for someone to build an automated solution (and charge $50-100).

Thanks again,
Raj

It won't download email from gmail unless you tell it to. Instead, you'll be
asking gmail to download from you (as you will have a local server).

Thanks very much for your wonderful and detailed tutorial. I'm about to use it to transfer about 6 years worth of emails currently in a .pst over to gmail. I have one major question before I proceed – all of my email is in a .pst (outlook 2007). I've used pop3 through gmail for all my mail for the last 3 years. Thus my .pst mails falls into two categories.
1. Old email that is not on gmail
2. Recent (<3 yrs) mail that is both in my .pst and still online on gmail.

Two questions:
1. If I follow your procedure, will I then have duplicate emails for the last 3 years?
2. I have deleted many unneeded emails over the years in outlook. Will this process re-download all my previously deleted email from gmail (as they are still sitting in my gmail folder since I primarily use outlook-pop3 as my interface).

The only solution that I can think of for these two issues is to completely delete all mail in gmail and then upload my .pst. I feel it's a risky thing if I make an error along the way.

Any guidance or thoughts are much appreciated.

Thanks again – I've been searching for an answer for a while and this is most informative page I've come across.

Best,
Raj

Thanks again
Philip

I actually didn't realise emails will only be moved from the inbox. I've now moved all my emails in Thunderbird to the inbox of the account I'm trying to connect to. I decided not to use several accounts – it'll have to take the time it takes.

I managed to connect for a little while and to some upload messages. But suddenly – for no reason whatsoever – it stopped. That is, I had not changed any setting at all. So now I'm stuck. I'm trying to recreate the situation that worked.

Btw – it appears that Gmail's POP setting (Enable for all mail etc) does not do anything, at least not for me, because the emails i did manage to upload were way older than the date when the POP was activated.

I get various errors:

Sometimes Gmail responds that my POP server (the internet IP address) is not found. Sometimes it says that there's a problem with the password or username (there is no problem). Sometimes it says there was a timeout (i've set all timeout settings I can find in Mercury to plenty of seconds so this error is odd).

I've tried making new local users in Mercury (and changing in Tbird too of course) but to no avail.

The one thing I have noticed is that in the POP3 Server window there will be a connection attempt from Gmail but it says [Not logged in] and then Gmail's IP address. Previously when it worked, the [Not logged in] would flash for a second and then the username would come up (just like it does in the IMAP module when I connect Tbird). But since the whole thing stopped working, I only get the [Not logged in] message.
– - – Any ideas on that and the rest of the above?

Thanks a million
P

Thanks again
Philip