Last weekend I decided to move to Gmail for real and say bye bye to Thunderbird for good. Easy as pie? Well… no, not if you want to do it right. But it’s worth it.
I’ve had a Gmail account for years but I’ve always stuck with my “old” account and my trusty Thunderbird. Don’t get me wrong: Thunderbird is a very good mail client. The best, in fact – but it’s still a local app, and we can’t have that, can we?
Also, as I’m using 3 different computers on an every day basis, even Thunderbird and an IMAP account isn’t the perfect solution. The SPAM problem was getting on my nerves too. I’m running a pretty aggressive SPAM filter on my ISP’s server but still a lot of crap slips through. Applying the Thunderbird SPAM filter (not bad, but not perfect either) and on top of that the very aggressive Spamato filter collection helps. But Spamato keeps filtering mails from my mom(!) and most of you will understand that precisely that kind of false positive is disqualifying. Above all: Thunderbird is not Web 2.0, because Web 2.0 is about trusting Google with all your data, remember? So here goes.
Switching to Gmail is of course easy. I transformed my ISP’s IMAP account to a simple forward, so that all my mail is still scanned for SPAM and viruses by my ISP and then forwarded to my Gmail account. No sweat.
But I still have 7651 old e-mails (not counting the thousands of mails I have sent since 2002, but they will stay on my harddrive for now) in my local mailbox on this very Dell Latitude D410. Among this immense pile of mails there just may be something of importance, so I want it all on my Gmail account for fast searching and easy access – and because I like Gmail’s neat labelling function.
First off I tried the GML (Gmail Loader) but turned out to be very slow and unstable. GML also uses forwarding to send the mails to Gmail, so the original headers are not preserved.
I decided to use the “Redirect” extension for Thunderbird instead. Doing a redirect the headers should be preserved – even though Gmail chooses to date stamp these mails with the arrival time anyway. Thus, each conversation (Gmail lingo for “thread”) is datestamped with the time ofarrival, but the date stamp of the original mails inside the conversation seems to be preserved. Good enough for me as all my old mails will be archived anyway.
So after having set up a Gmail filter to archive all incoming mail immediately and having deleted the largest of the old mails in my Thunderbird mail storage I started redirecting over 7.000 mails to my Gmail account. It worked, but my ISP’s SMTP chose to go into raving spamanoia overdrive and throttle me down. I had to kill Thunderbird a couple of times to get the redirecter up running again and found out that clearing c:\documents and settings\local settings\temp, seemed to help.
Anyway, here I am with 7000+ e-mails in my Gmail neatly stacked into 3.000-and-something conversations and furthermore compressed from more than 600 MB on my disk to 99 MB on Googles disk.
It’s fast – opening Gmail in Firefox is in fact faster than opening Thunderbird. And Thunderbird still is a Formula One car compared to that old freight train they call Outlook.
Yup – Gmail works like a charm. It’s just a really great service and the interface is so well designed. It’s not beautiful, to say at least, but it’s brilliant layed out and the use of Ajax makes it snappy in just the right places.
Sadly, I can’t get the Gmail notifier to work. A firewall or router somewhere between my home and Google just won’t let it through.
It seems like we?ve had the same considerations the last couple of weeks. Arrived at different solutions though.
I too have used Thunderbird for years, and left it for good (I guess). Not in favour for Gmail though. (I?ll not go into pros and cons of Gmail. I?ve never learned to appreciate Gmail?s allegedly brilliant way of handling content). Basically Thunderbird is a great mail client. But it lacks key features. The fact that it?s a client side app. is one of them, but the major problem is the lack of an integrated calendar and basic CRM functionality. There must be hundreds of thousands of users out there who would like and integrated calendar in their mail client. I my point of view, a mail client is not /only/ about electronic communication, but about human relations. If you are a business person, this includes clients and businesses too. So many will need some sort of basic CRM (I do). I?ve looked around for products with such functionalities, and the only app. that will provide that is Outlook with Business Contact Manager added. Now, I?m not a big fan of Microsoft as such, but I have to say that they do make great, easy to use software.
Getting my mails and contacts over was not as easy as it was for you. If I was migrating from any other app. than Thunderbird, Outlook provides excellent import/export functionality tools for almost any format. But it was next to impossible to get my contacts and mail from Thunderbird into Outlook. I?ll not bother you with the process.
Regarding client side/online access, I use an MS hosted exchange solution. It?s fast loading too, works in both browsers, and – most important ? is safe, secure, and private.
I suppose mail is just mail to you, so I?ll be sure not to invite you to a meeting from my Outlook calendar ?
Hi Stig,
You certainly have a point there. I should have mentioned that I’m only using Gmail for my private mail. At work I’m using Outlook / Exchange, and I couldn’t live without my Outlook Calendar and Contacts.
Gmail might be a nic app, but the security risks…
I never send my email adress to any gmail account…
More details: http://www.google-watch.org/gmail.html
cheers, mäc