When I began this article, I was ready to admit defeat. My goal: Move old Outlook email to my “hosted by Google” Gmail account (I wrote about that recently).
When I first set up my Google hosting, I was still using Outlook to retrieve my mail from the hosted Gmail. With the recent ramp up in spam volume, I reconfigured some accounts and decided this would be a good time to retire Outlook. It was very easy to get used to having access to all my email from anywhere with a browser. Notification was challenging at first (future article on that soon) but soon resolved. However, Outlook is hard to retire with quite a few years worth of saved email stored in it!
After some searching around, I realized I’d need to get my Outlook mail into a different format before I tried any of the tools I found. Fortunately, I have Mozilla Thunderbird installed and it had no problem importing all of my old Outlook stuff. An hour or so later and everything is now in mbox format.
Next, I found this article titled “How to Import Mail from Mozilla Thunderbird in Gmail” at About.com. Nice step by step instructions that worked all the way up to the last step. Clicking “Send to Gmail” in Gmail Loader threw no errors and sent no email. It showed (rather quickly) this:
mBox (Netscape, Mozilla, Thunderbird) at location D:/Documents and Settings/chris/Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/xxxxxxx.default/Mail/Local Folders/Outlook Mail0.sbd/Personal Folders 2.sbd/Inbox Opened Successfully.
Done. Stats: 0 success 0 error 0 skipped.
While writing this article, I found “How to Import Archived Outlook Email into Gmail using GML” at WikiHow. It strongly urges converting from Outlook to Outlook Express, then to Thunderbird stating that data is less likely to get corrupted. Very interesting!
Took some digging, but I found Outlook Express on this machine and did the conversion from Outlook. It only picked up my current mailbox, and I didn’t see an option to point it at the archived one. Will deal with that later, I guess. Next, I switched to Thunderbird and deleted my earlier imports. The import from Outlook Express went quickly and smoothly.
Fired up Gmail Loader again, pointed it to the mailbox and… nothing. The default SMTP server was timing out.
Fired up Gmail Loader again, pointed it to the mailbox, changed the SMTP server to match my Google hosted gmail server. Oooh, it didn’t like that! Got lots of messages about spam relaying. Oops. Quickly killed GML.
Fired up Gmail Loader again, pointed it to the mailbox, changed the SMTP server to match my broadband provider’s and it’s just ticking away in the background, sending one email every 2 seconds.
Lasted about 20 messages then my provider shut me down — too many connections too fast.
I’m still pondering admitting defeat. Anyone heard success stories on migrating old email up to Gmail? After a break, I’ll probably try some of the other Gmail smtp servers in hopes of hitting one that’s alive and working.
[Update, 5 minutes later] If it was a snake it would’ve bitten me. Right on the GML homepage:
- The default SMTP server does not work. Please look up the current SMTP server by clicking here and using one of the server names returned there as the SMTP server. I usually select the one with the highest prefrence number, since it is the least busy.
- If you are attempting to import your mail into your Gmail for Domains account, you need to look up the MX servers for your domain. There is an option on the right hand side of DNS Stuff to perform this task. Enter your domain name, slect MX, and then click “Lookup”. The destination address in GML should then be your gmail for domains address and not an @gmail or @googlemail address.
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November 24th, 2006 
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Great post! I ran into one problem about a month ago. Had my laptop but no Internet connection – and desperately needed a previously received email! Had I used Outlook, I would have at least had the email on my hard drive. D’oh…
Ack! Which is one thing I take for granted with Outlook – offline access.
Very good point, thanks for bringing it up!
I think I’ll keep outlook around and periodically have it pull the mail from hosted accounts, but I’ll configure it to “leave retrieved mail on the server”. That way it’ll act as a backup.
I used GML today. It works fine when you use a different smtp server. I had to try 4 to get it to work but then it finally did. The bad news is the time stamp for gmail is when you uploaded your emails. Best.
I could not for the life of me figure out why I couldn’t get it to work, until I realized that my ISP blocks any traffic not going through its SMTP servers. Once I pointed GML to their SMTP server, it worked like a charm. Fortunately, I was only moving a couple of hundred email (not thousands) and they didn’t prevent me from doing it.
Great post! Its help me.
One thing, the file of Thunderbird folder to select doesn’t have with .msf extension.
Select the file without extension of Thunderbird folder.
Hey Rafael, glad it helped and thanks for the feedback.
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