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yourself a lot of headaches. It takes longer to set up but it goes a lot faster. Since you can import the messages locally really fast in mercury, then set up google to pull them over time. I let it run over
the coarse of 2 days. An it had them all, correct dates and all.
I consolidated a bunch of old PSTs into a new one, then built a new Outlook profile to connect to gmail instead of the exchange server. I made the archive PST in the exchange profile the dominant PST in the IMAP mode, then dragged and copied the folders upto gmail...
gmail automatically tags them with the name of the PST folder, and preserves all the header information.
Any suggestions?
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?an...
Any thoughts?
1) add you gmail account to thunderbird as an IMAP account (you might try setting up a new gmail account so you don't endanger your normal one) then in thunderbird move the messages to the gmail account.
2) if your running mercury, test the connection by sending an email from gmail to your local account @your ip address
gmail will sent the information to you public ip address, your router should forward it to your computer, then mercury should take the email and stick in your inbox...if this doesn't work then you might have the wrong port forwarded in your router. POP3 is port 110, imap is port 143
It was my anti-virus program doing it. Got it stopped now Thanks again!!!
One other thing I encountered I thought I'd document to you for use in
your blog in case someone else runs into it. While copying email over
from my old notes file to the new notes account I'd occasionally get
this message, "Function Not Implemented by the Internet Messaging"
When I finally narrowed it down to which messages were creating this
error I found out they were invitations to meetings. So I deleted all
of them in my various email files and everything proceeded without a
hitch.
Hope that saves someone some headaches.
The most successful method I found is to:-
1) Configure Outlook 2003 (where the majority of my email resides) with an IMAP connection to my Gmail account.
2) Create two 'Favourite' folders, one to my Gmail inbox and another to Gmail Sent Mail (simply for ease of use)
3) Open the .PST file that contains the email I'd like to move into Gmail.
4) Select a bunch of emails you'd like to end up in your Gmail Inbox (try with 20 or so to start with)
5) Drag the selected emails onto the Inbox and wait.... Outlook will gather it's thoughts and then move the items from the Inbox into Gmail's Inbox
6) Check your Gmail Inbox to see the email sitting there in all their glory..
7) To move the Sent mail it's exactly the same as above but ensure you move it to your 'Sent Mail' folder unlike me as I moved a bunch of Sent mail into my Gmail inbox
Another trick I recently used to get my email from an old Gmail account into my new Gmail account was to:-
1) Setup my old Gmail account with IMAP access
2) Connect Outlook to this IMAP account
3) Now I have both old and new Gmail accounts setup in Outlook
4) Drag and drop the emails from one IMAP account to another! ; )
5) Hey - presto - mobile email retaining date stamps and header information
NOTES:
I've not moved a high volume of mail as yet but moving a small amount takes a while, so tread carefully when attempting to move lots of mail, it maybe worth removing unnecessary attachments first.
I find it useful to have Task Manager open with the Networking tab to view network traffic as Outlook appears to be Not Responding during the moving of mail
This has worked for me okay so far, I've plenty more to move and will post further notes if i find anything else.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/gallery/apps/m...
These may help.
1) I use Outlook Express, not Outlook. What are the adjustments I will need to make to get this transfer to go smoothly?(Keeping original time stamps AND being able to meta-tag emails going into Gmail are VERY important to me) Should I just install Outlook (.pst files) and move everything there instead, or can I avoid this step by moving mail directly from OE (.dbx files) to Thunderbird.
2) What will the final requirements be? I just have mail from Outlook Express (is a Hotmail account) to move. Will I need Mercury and Thunderbird with OE, or just Thunderbird with OE, or perhaps Thunderbird and Outlook.
1) Goto Gmail.com, Settings, Make sure IMAP is enabled, then click on "Configuration Instructions." Select Outlook Express and Read!
2) Follow instructions for Outlook Express! Drag/Drop your email!
That's it! Header information (dates, etc) are all transferred. If you set up folders, they act as GMail Labels too! So you can label as you drag and drop if you drop email into a specific folder (or just create a folder in Outlook Express). AMAZING!
The sole annoyment is that sent mail I imported are considered received mails in GMail and I can't force them to be moved to the Sent folder.
Thanks for your tutorial!
But now I read Chris comment from March 9th, 2008 and I think why would I've not simply configure IMAP directly between Outlook 2007 and GMail like described in that Help article: https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?a...
Thanks for the fantastic tutorial. I successfully moved over several old Lotus Notes archives from my old job into Gmail. Even the conversations are linked together Gmail style!
My only problem is this. Within Gmail, looking at my Inbox (under any label or All Mail) all the mail is listed with the date I moved the files over. WITHIN each email the date information is accurate, it is just the inbox view where the dates are wrong. But that means I cannot sort my 5 years worth of mail in chronological order.
Any suggestions for remedying this? I would delete and re-import the mail if needed.
Thanks!
Lindsay
Hmm...Once its in gmail I don't know how to change the dates. But you could do a search and delete them then reimport them (just search for your old work address in the "to" field and delete everything). Then you can try mapping from lotus notes directly to you Gmail with IMAP.
To do this open lotus notes and create a new inbox that point to gmail via imap. You should see your gmail emails start to appear there (or set up a new gmail account to import to first).
Then open your work email (in lotus notes), select all the messages and copy them then go to the gmail inbox (in lotus notes) and paste them (now wait a long time for lotus notes to move all the messages). The should have the correct dates in gmail now.
On the Lotus Notes side, viewing the Gmail inbox, all the dates are correct. But on the Gmail side they are incorrect. I can't imagine why.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?an...
Incorrect dates on uploaded messages:
Messages uploaded or copied into Gmail using IMAP may display the wrong date in your inbox or other labels. The correct dates should appear in conversation view.
This is a known issue, and we appreciate your patience as we work to resolve it.
Anyway, thanks very much again Ben!
about the dates. That is why I used the POP3 method in the article. If
you set up your own email server (mercury) locally you can save
yourself a lot of headaches. It takes longer to set up but it goes a
lot faster. Since you can import the messages locally really fast in
mecurcy, then set up google to pull them over time. I let it run over
the coarse of 2 days. An it had them all, correct dates and all.
http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.a...
Later
C
http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/duplicate_remover/
My question: Do I have to recreate every single folder (I have loads ...) in gmail? Or is it possible to copy both folders and messages from OE to gmail?
In my case, I just have one source to export: Lotus Notes... This is what I did. I tried first to export to Outlook with Transend, without success, so I exported first to Outlook Express and then with the import wizard import it to Outlook. That worked fine, but I have some special character issues (á, é, ó, ö, ñ).
Anyway I decided to continue from that point to do some tests. I found a tool called Google Email Uploader, but it *just* seems to work with google apps, (not with normal gmail accounts). I used, with a google apps account, and I have like 175 messages dropped because of RFC messaging formatting issues, but worked quite fine.
I found out the dates issue, for instance: an original message from 07/Nov/07, was uploaded as 08/Nov/07... This might be a serious problem, since I wouldn't be able to follow the dates. I read that this should be fixed with Mercury/Pop solution (I will try it).
My major concern is that I would like to do this as an incremental process. I would like to upload emails every month or so on. I have several folders in my Notes client, and monthly there are new mails on each folder. It would be possible to do this incrementally? How?
Thank you very much in advance, and congratulations on your tutorial, It has been very helpfull!
By the way, what happens with the folder-label mapping with Mercury?
Folders are going to be automatically mapped to labels? Dates issues should be solved with the Mercury-Pop technique, right?
I will try to forward the ports from a Linux box to the Windows-Mercury box, cos I don't dare to leave a Windows directly to the internet hehehehehe...
I never heard from Ben, but I wanted to let everyone else know who reads this blog, that if you use Outlook Express, you can move all email to GMail very easily! I could have skipped ALL this. Here are the steps:
1) Goto Gmail.com, Settings, Make sure IMAP is enabled, then click on “Configuration Instructions.” Select Outlook Express and Read!
2) Follow instructions for Outlook Express! Drag/Drop your email!
That’s it! Header information (dates, etc) are all transferred. If you set up folders, they act as GMail Labels too! So you can label as you drag and drop if you drop email into a specific folder (or just create a folder in Outlook Express). AMAZING!
I did the IMAP settings in Google and Outlook Express, but I'm not sure about Copying and pasting email into gmail. I have 1000's of emails, so I don't want to be pasting all those emails individually. I just could not Drag and Drop the emails! Once I go to OE, my browser is minimized. Even if I have browser window and OE side to side, i can't sem to Drop the emails. Where do I drop the emails in gmail?
Thanks
PS.: Any news on transferring chats? I'd love to send some of my old ICQ conversation to my Gmail account. :)
@Ana: you can use a service such as DynDNS.org (which I use), No-IP.com or many others. With them, you get a subdomain name (such as "yourname.dyndns.org") that always points to your dynamic IP address. But how it works? Well, many consumer-grade hardware firewalls support these services. You fill your username and password somewhere in its configuration screen, and they'll start sending your new IP address to the service whenever it changes, what in turn keeps your subdomain pointing to the right place. Alternatively, if your firewall doesn't support this feature, or if you don't use one, you can install a small software that sits in your tray and does the same. End result: in step 9, instead of writing "bs1999@70.241.139.3", you'd write something like "bs1999@yourname.dyndns.org".
That's the theory, at least. I'm going to try it myself in a few days, but it's 99.9% certain it'll work as expected.
When copy-pasting from Lotus Notes to the imap account, all the messages are converted to plain text, which, for some documents, is unacceptable, because you lose all the formatting, which sometimes make the email unreadable.
Is there a way to preserve the emails in their original form with html format? For example, when forwarding an email from within Lotus Notes to a non-Lotus-Notes email address, you can do it as "plain text" (= what the copy-paste from Lotus Notes to imap account is apparently doing), or you can do it in "html format". I would like the latter to apply when I paste into the imap account. Is this possible? How?
Thanks in advance,
Dan.
them over. Don't open the message and copy it. Rather open the inbox, or
sent messages, or ...as in my case... the archive folders and select all
messages, go to the imap folder in lotus notes and paste them. You are
essentially moving the messages from one folder (your archive) to a new
folder (the imap folder). Hope this helps.
When I do that, the messages, of course, undergo some internal conversion, as they are internally saved as Lotus Notes objects. The conversion is such that it transforms the messages to plain text, as plain text is what I'm getting at the other end :(
Now, I know Lotus Notes has the capability to do a much better job (because, when I want it to, it forwards emails as html just fine, so it knows hows to do it). I just don't know how instruct it to do said better job when I copy paste into the imap folder.
Thanks,
Dan.
enough, they were all text, no formating. It is still usable for me (i
didn't even notice) so I'm not sure what the solution is. My objective was
to preserve it all in one place so I didn't care that the formating was
lost.
time. Alas, losing the formatting makes some email simply unreadable.
I would therefore like to report here that I've found an alternative
way to migrate from lotus notes and convert any set of selected emails
to "eml" format, in a way that preserves the formatting. The "eml"
format can be converted to the canonical MBOX format using such tools
as eml2mbx (http://home.arcor.de/luethje/prog/) or eml2mbox
(hrrp://www.broobles.com/eml2mbox). Alternatively, "eml" files can be
directly imported to Thunderbird through the ImportExportTools add-on
(http://www.nic-nac-project.de/~kaosmos/mboximpo...).
The way to export Lotus Notes email does not involve IMAP. Instead,
you configure you Lotus Notes client such that an 'export' option is
added to your 'Actions' menu. This option converts the selected emails
to "eml" files.
The instructions are found here:
"Lotus Notes Email Export"
http://tech.niques.info/projects/lotus-notes-em...
Perhaps you should include this information in your above post.
Thanks again for the quick replies,
Dan.
Cool idea with Mercury (IMAP from Notes to Gmail is a disaster). Ran into an interesting problem with Folders--maybe you have a suggestion?
Have a few folders to transfer from Notes to Gmail and want to preserve the folders as labels. Set up the mercury server, and started uploading locally into folders I had created on mercury through IMAP and Notes.
When I finally started Thunderbird, I noticed that none of the folders appeared--only the files in the "inbox".
Figured that they must only want subfolders of inbox, so moved them all in notes
Nothing
Tried to move them back, now I'm getting IMAP errors--no such folders-and all my uploaded mails are gone
Erased the lotus notes cache, now there's no folders and no mails.
Any ideas?
An easier (if slightly amoral) solution which also provides dates:
1. Open a gmx mail account.
2. Synch gmx imap w/Thunderbird
3. Drag/drop all localhost mail to gmx account (the IMAP NEVER FROZE 4 ME, EVEN AFTER 9000 EMAIL!!)
4. DL all GMX mail into Gmail using the gmailPOP service.
TADA.
GMX probably supports the use of tags/folders, too.
I realize that this is sort of wrong, and that I shouldn't abuse gmx, but...well i did.
I have saved my .pst fiels on a disc, can I use your process for retrieving my files? They are form my old MS Outlook and now I am using gmail
Thanks!!
Garth M
thanks
garth m
goal. Search for .pst readers or install the trial of outlook for mac.
This method will work after that.
As for the Gmail upload tool, my guess is that it was an assignment for someone at Google and that they have little incentive to get all the idiosyncrasies of the Outlook format worked out. My guess is that it will choke up at lots of places. The benefits of having the email server in between is that the IMAP and POP protocols are highly standard and tested extensively for the various email clients. The chances of any given email client to be able to talk to a local email server properly are very high.
I think this is an elegant solution and I will explore using an Outlook add-on I use with this setup. It is called Clear Context and let's me quickly file email threads. Right now I have it filing things to a PST file but I will test having it file directly to the local IMAP server and see if I can have Gmail pull emails from there periodically. This way I have a complex but hopefully stable solution for archiving emails out of my exchange mailbox into Gmail.
I would not recommend the techniques being tried here to anyone who does not consider themselves an expert email user with detailed knowledge of email formats.
I actually think there is a good business for someone to create an add-on for Outlook allows for archiving to Gmail but uses a technique similar to this to create a local cache that let's Outlook run at full speed and sends data to Gmail in the background. Sort of the way ZumoDrive has been able to do a great job of a cloud based local drive.
great work with this article Ben.
imported them to gmail, I set gmail to tag all email in that batch with
"sent".
Of course if they are already in gmail, just search for all the email sent
by your various email address, select all and tag them.
they are in gmail
I'm running into some trouble with step #9. When trying to set up the pop3 and it asks me to enter the email address, it will not accept my local host username and ip address as the email. I've read that I might have to enter brackets around the ip address to get it recognized, but that did not work either. Any suggestions??
Thanks?
So... do I get my user name and server info 1) my university or 2) Time Warner. Similarly, do I use my university email password (which is automatically associated with thunderbird), or do I use my router password (which I'm not even sure what it is)?
I'm basically confused about how to pick correct servers, IP addresses and passwords.
Thanks-
Task 'Checking for new mail in subscribed folders on localhost.' reported error (0x800CCC0E) : 'Outlook is unable to download folder (null) from the IMAP e-mail server for account localhost. Error: Unable to connect to the server. If you continue to receive this message, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).'
Task 'localhost: Folder:Inbox Check for new mail.' reported error (0x800CCC0E) : 'Outlook is unable to download folder Inbox from the IMAP e-mail server for account localhost. Error: Unable to connect to the server. If you continue to receive this message, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).'
I followed your directions faithfully -- port 143 for incoming server, and all that -- but am stuck. Any suggestions? Thanks, Ben!
set up properly by trying to connect with outlook express. Another thing to
try is connect using you ip address instead of local host.
install carefully. There must be some way to confirm that it works.
Seems like a hassle but It's worth it to do it right.
I'm having trouble getting Outlook to connect to the new Mercury server. I tested Mercury by sending an email (to myname@'my IP address' ) from my Gmail account, and it showed up fine in my Outlook Inbox. I also tried the reverse, sending a test email from Mercury (File>Send Mail Message) to gmail -- no luck in that direction.
I set up Outlook exactly as above, using "myname@localhost" as the email address and "localhost" as the incoming&outgoing server. When I click "Test Account Settings" in the setup box, it says it can't log in to the server. The incoming IMAP port number is 143. The outgoing port number is 25. None of the settings in Mercury mentioned "localhost", though. Did I miss something?
[Windows Vista SP1 / Outlook 2007 / Mercury v4.72 ]
Thanks.
reference for your computer. If not, try replacing localhost with you local
ip address or 127.0.0.1. so:
name_of_mailbox_you_set_up_in_mercury@127.0.0.1Also:
- check the log files for errors.
- You're outgoing address might need to match. So when you set up outlook,
make sure you set you name and address to match the account you created.
- SMTP is a separate service and you might have not turned it on in mercury
so you can receive but not send. Make sure SMTP is enabled - if it is,
you'll see a little window running and when you send a message you will see
it in the log in that window in mercury.
Good luck.
Thanks a lot for this great tutorial. I tried to set it up with Parallels because I'm using a Macintosh and all my e-Mail since 1998 is stored in Microsoft Entourage. It is a big hassle to im- and export from Entourage to Thunderbird and still I get the Mercury not working.
Two days ago Mac released its new OS called Leopard Server. Do you think I will be able to import my email with that new OS establishing a POP3-Server there?! Or is there any other useful method to import from Mac Entourage (POP3 offline database) to Gmail not losing dates? Please help me guys, thanks a lot!!!
up a local server on a mac.
This occurred on Windows Vista x64 with SP2 using Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Mercury/32 version 4.7
For awhile I could not get Outlook to connect to Mercury via IMAP. Watching the log, I could clearly see that no connection was ever made.
I decided to check on what "localhost" is so I pinged it (Start > Run > "cmd", then "ping localhost" in the console). I saw the IP was in the 128-bit form as "::1". Since I suspected that maybe one of the programs only supports 32-bit IPs, I edited the Email Account info in Outlook, replacing every instance of "localhost" with "127.0.0.1". This worked flawlessly and I was able to proceed.
I request that you update your guide to include mention of this possible scenario, since I'm certain that many other people are probably inflicted with this issue.
Then my QNAP 639pro and failed.
Finally since google controls my whole life, I decided to give into gmail since it will be auto-backed up, always available (phone/work/home/etc..), my disjointed accounts have me missing things (I get about 100-200 "critial emails" daily), and using thunderbird with sbpython KILLS my machine (except for my 3GHz quadcore).
I just hope that they make gmail eventually work better with folders just like reader works.
I have 16GB of emails going back to 1994 that I want to keep.
This will work 100% for me I hope. Last night, I tried to drag and drop almost 10K pictures from my gf to gmail and it uploaded 97 and then went :(.
"A message in your account ______ was listed with an invalid size. It has been left on the server.
Thanks,
The Gmail Team"
I see TONS of those things. and then when I look in the mail boxes it looks like there are emails without any information attached to them. Except for the time that google tried accessing them and "replied to" information on the left hand side. Like the deletion didn't work. I'm just worried that I'm loosing emails.
-carrie