GMail Trek 1
Posted on: 07.19.2005
I think I’ve finally grown accustomed the GMail way of doing things. Yep, I’m gonna take the plunge and transfer my entire archive of email to Gmail. I found a neat little utility called GMail Loader that can easily forward mail from a Mozilla App to GMail. I’ve been using Thunderbird for quite a few years now so I don’t have to worry about compatibility. I did a few tests with GMail Loader and it worked very well, although a bit slow.
The Current Way:
Right now I run a self-contained install of Thunderbird from my little 2.5” 60GB USB HDD. It works well since all I have to do is plug the drive into any Win98+ machine and open Thunderbird on the drive. All of my Email is stored in a Profile that is located in the Thunderbird folder. Simple and very convenient.
The Potential:
In my tests I’ve found that importing the email into GMail’s interface and then archiving it works really well. If I’m looking for a specific message all I have to do is type a few letters of what I know about the email and there it is. I’m a really big fan of having my email accessible from any OS that has an internet connection too.
What Pushed Me Over The Edge:
Back in the day, I used to own a couple of Amiga Computers (A500, A3000). I still have a few emails from that machine that I occasionally peruse through. I found that after I switched to Outlook Express and then Thunderbird on a PC that my Amiga UUEncoded email attachments failed to extract properly. All of my registration keys were no longer accessible to me. However, during my GMail conversion testing phase I just so happened to try one of my old Amiga emails with a UUEncoded attachment and to my great surprise, the attachment can be successfully extracted from within GMail. My old Amiga software registrations can now be used in my WinUAE emulation environment!!! Thank you GMail, I love you!
The Hard Part:
Now I have to spend the time slowly importing all 93MB of my current email archive and taking the time to make sure that GMail doesn’t mark it as spam.
I will check back when all is complete and let you all know if it worked as expected.
