… to Chance.
(Sorry. Old joke.)
Okay, so I’m really dedicated to the idea of getting my Thunderbird e-mail into GMail, so that I have that funky Google search access to everything …
Google GMail Loader (GML) is a very cool program that will convert various e-mail programs such that they can be loaded into GMail. The main trick to all this is that there’s no automagical load to GMail — the “load” is done by routing the e-mail as individual messages to my GMail account. The program manages it so that the original sender/recipients remain as they were — only the date gets updated.
Main problem with that is that it’s a looooong process. GML ratchets the process back to send an e-mail every two seconds — which sounds okay, but when you’re talking about a thousand messages — in a single folder — that’ 2000 seconds, or about half an hour of time.
Okay, so I’m a bit of a pack rat. (I will pause for a moment to let the laughter die down.) I don’t generally get rid of things like e-mail. I like to blame it on my being an historian at heart, but …
Anyway, I had untold thousands of messages in my Thunderbird store, totalling about 1.2Gb. I spent the past few days doing some bulk cleaing of crap, and got it down to about 900Mb — which is still going to be an all-weekend effort.
One other complication with GML is that it works on Thunderbird inbox folders. You can just point at the Thunderbird message store — you have to point at the file “Inbox.” And that just does the stuff in “Inbox.” If, like me, you have eleventy dozen folders things are broken into … it promises to be a long effort.
At least I determined that it would actually do any non .msf folder file, so that I don’t have to shuffle stuff around.
Okay, one more complication. It does seem important to (a) Compact the files in Thunderbird before doing an export from them. And, even then, sometimes some old, deleted messages get forwarded along. Hrm.
I do have to get this all done by Monday, before I sign in at the office, and SMTP gets blocked on my machine. So, to it!
So this has been taking a lot longer than expected. Only a fraction of my message store has gotten transferred up to GMail. And, of course, when I log in tomorrow, my SMTP ability gets blocked.
*Sigh*
Fortunately, I’ve run across Thunderstor, which will allow me to export from Thunderbird to individual .msg files. Which, for stuff I don’t need to have active in my message store is a fine alternative. And it provides me a bit of extra time to deal with things.
Also on GML, note that the default SMTP address for routing to GMail may or may not be correct. A good way to see current SMTP sites within Google is here.
Okay, on further review (via Mail2Web), I see that there’s 400-odd messages sitting in the dave@h-K mailbox. Which is odd, because it should all be getting forwarded to my Gmail account.
Nothing critical — most actually looks like spam — but I need to poke into things a bit on this tonight, as I can’t actually get to the cpanel controls for mail from the office (mutter mutter) due to the port it’s configured on.