Google Hacks, 2nd Edition

Import Mail into Gmail

Moving to Gmail doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. Forward mail in bulk from your computer or other web mail service to your Gmail account.

The most enticing feature of Gmail is probably its ability to perform Google-style searches on your own inbox. The one gigabyte of free space is intriguing, but it’s not much when you consider that you have far more than that available to you on even your most outdated PC. And I’d warrant that not even its snazzy JavaScripted user interface is enough to tear you away from your existing web mail service, uprooting yourself and starting over.

Gmail doesn’t currently provide any way to import your existing email archive (web mail service or desktop mailbox). While you already might have considered forwarding all that mail to your Gmail account, just how to do so—even just the few hundred “important” messages—is quite a trick.

Not so, thanks to hacks like the Google Mail Loader for forwarding desktop mail and web mail intermediaries YPOPs! for Yahoo! Mail and MSN email and GetMail for Hotmail.

Forward Desktop Mail

The Google Mail Loader (http://www.marklyon.org/gmail; GNU Public License) is a point-and-click application that reads your existing mail files on your computer and forwards the messages on to Gmail—one every two seconds, so as not to overload or otherwise annoy the Gmail servers. It does so without deleting mail from your local computer; what’s sent to Gmail is a copy of each and every message. You can even ...