As I’m trying to finish my migration of personal stuff from my work laptop to my home laptop, one long-outstanding item is email migration — to wit, I have a ton of mail (from 2006 and earlier) still sitting in Thunderbird that needs either archiving or moving into Gmail.
Originally I did a bunch of this through an automated forwarding widget, the Google Gmail Loader, which worked fine except that it frelled up the send date.
Recently I ran across several articles (e.g.) that pointed out a more clever way of doing this:
- Set up Gmail to act as an IMAP server.
- Point Thunderbird to Gmail as an IMAP source.
- Basically reverse the normal process — drag mail from Thunderbird folders into Gmail.
Voila. Mail appears in Gmail, suitable for archiving, and with dates preserved.
I set this up last night, and it worked pretty well. The main issue seems to be that Gmail throttles the connection (I ran across a reference to it somewhere last night, but can’t find it now) to some hundreds of messages per hour, after which time the transfer fails until a cool-off has occurred. That’s annoying, to say the least, but I think I can work with it over time. And it would be nice to get all of that mail into a searchable platform.
By the way, this is now going great guns. I don’t know why last night it was choking after a handful of mail drags, but now I’m dragging whole blocks of stuff over. Still going to take a while, but it’s a path-forward for me and, after that, for Margie.