MethylBlue
  1. Filelight
  2. Codeine
  3. Wocka
  4. Blog
  5. Detritus
  6. Home
RSS

Importing old email into GMail

I’ve tested the new GMail Fetcher, that can fetch mail into your GMail account from other pop3 mailboxes.

The date is set correctly on receipt, as I hoped and suspected.

The alternative until now was forwarding mail using one of a few tools designed exactly for this purpose. But, using a forwarding strategy meant the email dates get revised to the time Google receives the mail. Which means you have old mail before new mail in your inbox, which sucks.

So all I need is someway to host my unix Mail folder as a pop3 mailbox and I can import all my old mail into GMail and the dates will be correct. Which is just perfect :)

Now can someone suggest a tool? Or do I have to adapt something?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 1:37 and is filed under Work. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses

  1. You’ll find that whilst the dates are incorrect in the gmail inbox, the date header is still intact - so opening the email should show the correct date.

    Seb Ruiz Identicon Icon Seb Ruiz February 19th, 2007 at 21:35

  2. Well that’s good. But I still want to have them listed in the correct order too. So I can stroll down memory lane in chronological order :)

    Max Howell Identicon Icon Max Howell February 20th, 2007 at 13:20

  3. i’ve also been looking for a way to get 10+ years of emails into gmail with propper dates. i don’t know if threads will be properly composed from the raw emails.

    another solution, which i’ve yet to try, is to set up gmail as an imap account, so that you simply copy the actually emails from within thunderbird or some other email client.

    http://www.butterfat.net/igmail/

    i just haven’t had the time. but let me know if you try this with any success.

    mitkase Identicon Icon mitkase March 14th, 2007 at 17:36

  4. From looking at the site, it seems it won’t be able to move files into GMail. But I’m not sure. Maybe it’ll work.

    I may write a tool this weekend.

    Max Howell Identicon Icon Max Howell March 14th, 2007 at 17:56

  5. in an email from the author:

    Unfortunately, no. If iGmail was an actual IMAP interface to a real mailbox, then this would be a natural feature of using IMAP. iGmail, however, is merely a gateway to the online information about your mail. Since there is no way to upload mail to the web client, there is no way to do so through this gateway.

    mitkase Identicon Icon mitkase March 23rd, 2007 at 14:03

  6. Someone suggested on a Digg thread I read that if you have access to an IMAP mailbox that also supports pop3 access, you can drag and drop your old mails into the IMAP mailbox, and then get gmail to import them through the pop3 interface. This seems the easiest and best option for me as I have such a thing handy.

    How to do sentmail though is the question?

    Max Howell Identicon Icon Max Howell March 23rd, 2007 at 14:18

Leave a Reply