Storing everything, especially email in the cloud had been all the buzz lately.
Since moving to GMail I have not use a email client again. Going back to email client like ThunderBird seems like a step backward. No more worry about migrating email archive when changing computer, reinstalling system. No more backing up and copies of backup of different clients lying around. Whether working at home, office or cafes, it is just a single logon.
Well then the last step to complete the cloud migration is to move the outstanding archives backup dating almost a decade ago into the cloud. And I did it last weekend.
Here are some notes for those intenting to move existing Pegasus Mail or ThunderBird email archive into GMail.
ThunderBird
Since both ThunderBird and GMail both support IMAP, it is rather easy to install a copy of ThunderBird (I use the version from PortableApps which can be installed and then deleted after use.)
- Follow this instruction to setup your GMail and ThunderBird for IMAP.
- Next Add an POP3 account to hold your archive mails.
- Go to (for Thunderbird Portable) ThunderBirdPortable/Data/profile/Mail, look for the account created.
- Copy your backup mail archive into this folder. (You did backup the profile folder of your old Thunderbird right?)
Once setup you can run ThunderBird and just drag old emails into the GMail IMAP folders.
Some useful tips I had discovered,
- GMail uses Labels (or tags) to represent the folders in IMAP. To create sub-folders, you can name the label in a directory-like format.
So using labels arc/work, arc/personal, in ThunderBird they will appear as arc folder with 2 sub-folders work and personal. - If you have thousands of emails, hue attachments and a slow connection, move them in a few parts.
- Connect to the webmail and Thunderbird IMAP at the same time. Occassionally Thunderbird will report a Web login required (Failure) error which is fixed by signing on to GMail from the web.
Pegasus Mail
Pegasus Mail (PMail) is the very first email client I use and I still have some old archives in there.
PMail also support IMAP so on first assumption is that it would work like ThunderBird. Unfortunately, when the mails were copied over, the date of the emails were not preserved. So if you want to preserve the email date, there is extra steps involved.
The solution I used is to copy the email first to ThunderBird and then to GMail.
- First download a copy of PMail.
- Install and copy the email directory you had backup to the email directory created in the install. Just overwrite everything.
- If the mail directory path is different before and now, edit this file in the folder: PMAIL.INI
- Run Pegasus Mail and all the old mails and folders should appear.
- Create a folder with Unix Mailbox Format. Create as many as needed.
- Copy your emails into the created folder
- Go to the email directory mentioned in step 2. The folder created in step 5 should appears as UNXnnnnn.MBX where nnnnn is some numbers. Sort the folder by date would really help if you have lots of files.
- Setup ThunderBird following the section above. Copy the .MBX files to the ThinderBird account directory.
- Run ThunderBird and the folder should appears.
- Copy to GMail with ThunderBird IMAP.
I hope these steps help you to move all the old email archives that are sitting around, moving from backup harddisk to backup harddisk, into the cloud.
It is simply just amazing that the few thousand emails moved in did not even takes up a few percents of GMail 7281G.
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