GMail Tools
I’ve been thinking about moving some of my older email out of a rather large Outlook PST into GMail, mainly for backup purposes. However, since this is far from a unique idea, I decided to see what others have done…

Forwarding of the mails works good, but when they arrive, the date/time to the right of the email in label view refers to when they arrived at the gmail account. In message view, the original date and time shows up, but not in label view. Is there any way to apply the original send date to the messages in label view? Here’s what i mean: http://stromengineering.com/new/wtf.gif Thanks.

They appear to have changed the behaviour. What was in the ‘To:’ header is now in ‘Delivered-To:’ so you’re right: there’s no obvious way to auto-label without changing the subject. I’ll post back here if I discover a workaround.

jaytee, just click on ‘Create a Filter’ then put username+label@gmail.com in the ‘To:’ field. Click on ‘next step’ and check the ‘apply label’ box, choose a label and you’re done.

Say,
A question:
I am getting a whole string of errors after succesfully importing 66 emails. Emails 67-196 are ERROR cannot stend message.
Any thoughts on how to work this out?
I am using Thunderbird and have gotten a good amount of e-mail into gMail.
Thanks for any suggestions!

Nice one Chu…first imports successfully completed…

Ingo

Danyel: I didn’t know that. That is so cool!

It also means I’ve done that label feature for nothing, heh.

Oh, I forgot to add that a workaround is to just compact every mailbox before you import it. That removes all of the deleted messages from the mailbox.

Ok, so I’ve come up with an idea of how to export my Outlook mail to Gmail. Ihad been trying to go the Outlook->Thunderbird->Gmail method, but that’s just not going to work.

So my idea is:

1. in Outlook, copy all of my local mail to an IMAP message store.
2. Find/Create a script that will POP that mailbox, and redirect the POPed mail to GMail.

whaddya think? Apparently there are tons of problem with exporting Outlook mail because of the richtext format, and other crazy things… but exporting to IMAP works well.

Seems like Thunderbird is not pumping out standard mbox file format. You can try Outlook Express instead, and then use dbxconv http://people.freenet.de/ukrebs/dbxconv.html
to convert the OE file into box standard mbox files.

I haven’t used Thunderbird’s import function to import Outlook (and Outlook Express) emails before. But I’d figure it’d place the mbox file in your Thunderbird profile directory. Try going to %APPDATA%\Thunderbird\Profiles\default.xxx\Mail or %APPDATA%\Thunderbird\Profiles\default.xxx\ImapMail (if you use IMAP like me). The mbox file should be without an extension (it’s not the .msf files). If you’re uncertain, try opening it in a text editor. You should be able to read it and it’ll start with a “From – ” line with your emails listed one by one after that.

mtn: Did you get a whole chain of “ERROR:” messages, or did it end up with this message:
—
Exodus complete.
Statistics: 0 successful, 0 error.
—
If so, the file you’re importing is not in mbox format, or it could be corrupted.

have you tried it w/o adding the extension?

Well, it doesn’t seem to want to import my files. I imported about 20MB of my outlook files into Thunderbird, and then tried to import the mbox files, but I get

Importing from ‘F:\messages\Inbox2.mbox’ into [emailremoved]…
Using SMTP server: gsmtp57.google.com
Exodus complete.
Statistics: 0 successful, 0 error.

that particular file is 6.8MB (I added the mbox extension to the thundebird mbox file)

any ideas?

0.1 worked great… looking forward to playing w/ 0.2.

and these features would rock:
- Delay field (for specifying the delay between sending one message and the next)
- Interactive importing (”Yes/No/Yes to all”)

…the interactive importing especially!

Is there any tool for *nix that can import gmail messages into mbox/maildir? I know there’s Pop Goes the Gmail for windows, but am unable to find a *nix equivalent

After a great deal of trouble, I finally figured out a system to export from outlook, so gExodus will upload. Thunderbird is not it.

Unfortunately, I’m just importing from Outlook to Outlook Express, and using an .mbx to mbox converter. gExodus does the rest.

It’s a great little application, though!

Oh, and, a side note: If you’re using the label option, make sure you choose something that is guaranteed 100% unique. I just used the domain names of each of my accounts, which turned out to be a bad idea. Searching for “[cox]” will return everything that has “cox” in it, therefore, it’s a bad label.

Just something to watch out for. :)

Prashant wrote:

This might be a bug.

When the label field is filled in and the program encounters a message in the mbox file that does not have a subject, it hangs up and does nothing.

Has anyone else seen this?

–

I’ve seen the same thing. Otherwise this is a great program, though.

To the people who had this error when going from Outlook->Thunderbird->Gmail –

—
Exodus complete.
Statistics: 0 successful, 0 error.
—

I had the same problem. What I did was I went from Outlook->Outlook Express->Thunderbird->Gmail and for some reason this worked without any problems.

So I went into Outlook Express first and imported from Outlook.

Then went to Thunderbird and imported from Outlook Express.

Try that. :)

- Thomas.

I cant seem to import my mbox format emails to gmail. i have SMTP server listed as gsmtp57.google.com. Any ideas?

“Recurse subdirectories and import all the mailboxes in each directory”

“To date the email by the original date.”

These should really be implemented asap.
This tool rocks!

I too get the

Cannot connect to SMTP server

message, what should i do?

How do you import mail from Yahoo?

Hi there!!!

Great Application. I had about 5000 messages to import into Gmail, and your application worked like a charm for about 400 messages, which was then i paused it. (Just so that my company’s mail server and google’s mail server are not loaded) I then continued the operation, but this time I’m unable to see any new items in Gmail. There isn’t any error message shown in Exodus. Is there any way I can debug this behavior?

I’d also recommend adding a time interval between loading messages.

Cheers,

Sachin

nevermind. dur. didn’t extract zip file with folders on. i hate when i forget to turn that back on :)

I was wondering if have been able to update the application?
I can’t get more than 20 messages uploaded before it starts throwing errors. Maybe its connecting to fast to the gmail servers. I was wondering for a way to increase the time delay.

Excellent work, the original program by Mark was unstable and crashed after 50 messages or so. Your program is much faster and more stable.

Unfortunately the dates are still wrong. I realise that this isn’t something you can fix – it’s a failing of Gmail itself. Surely it’s in Google’s interest to make it as easy as possible for me to switch?

Disclaimer; i haven’t tried gexodus yet!

But from the screenshots it takes “username” @gmail.com as an input.

Some of us are using gmail’s hosted domains feature, so we’re using our own private domains. It would be great if we could use this tool to import mail into our own domain as well. I’m not sure of the @gmail.com precludes that or not. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thank you very much for this product! It was just what I needed to move all my old mails to Gmail and preserve them “for ever”.

To follow up on VSZ’s post, has anyone found out any info on using this with hosted domain gmail accounts? I haven’t tried it, but that @gmail.com hardcoded bit makes me assume that it ain’t gonna work. It’s amazing how many of Google’s own tools don’t yet work with hosted accounts…

hello, i used your great utility to upload 7000 mails to my gmail-account (-:
it´s a great piece of software. thanks.

i converted outlook-express dbx-files with dbxconv and uploaded these files

most file had no problems. however a single mdx file did not work as expected. your program stopped after uploading a few mails. (no error, no crash, no further upload… – i don´t know what happened here..)
i copied the mails to another folder, compressed it, converted it again and tried to upload it. the same problem. mark lyons upload hat similar problem with this file.

suggestions:
improve the log

typical message:
Statistics: 2411 successful, 2 error.
so wich mails had erros?. scrolling the log is a pain.

tell me how many message are in the file before starting the upload. try to give a rough estimate of time left.

thanks

Hi, first, thank for a nice application. It does work, but I do have some problems.
I am using the latest (stable) Thunderbird (1.5.x) on Mac OS X. I’ve just moved my mailbox file with ~2000 old mails to windows box, and I tried to upload it to gmail.

None of proposed SMTP servers does work at all, not the default 57something, not the active which I located by MX lookup. Finally, I got some response from the local server in my company (mail.mpi-stuttgart.mpg.de) but all fun stops after 8 mails.

Any hint, tip or trick to try?

Is there any way that you can preserve the original dates/times (in the original headers) that the emails were sent? That would make this great product even better! Right now the date/time that shows up in Gmail (how Gmail sorts things) is the date/time that Gexodus imports the mail into Gmail.

I would really love to get a hold of a program which preserves the original dates the emails were sent, so I can sort my emails by date. Reading the posts, it seems others would really like this as well.

Any possibility of this in the future?

Thanks for this great tool. I agree with the others here saying that the date/time should be preserved when it reaches your Gmail inbox. IMO, it’s not a proper import if the date and time aren’t presented properly. Hopefully Google will take notice of this – maybe even making their own import tools. Any workarounds until they do??

It might be useful too if you could integrate dbxconv into gExodus; i.e. allowing people to import and convert Outlook Express DBXs seamlessly.

This app is 2 years old and it’s still getting comments LOL! Do you think it will get an update soon??

Hiya, great tool. I am too looking for a way to upload to hosted account, so not using an @gmail.com address. Also, date/time preservation?

Is there any way to filter emails in Thunderbird against your existing gmail account. In the beginning I was using Thunderbird and gmail — I want to delete call emails from Thunderbird that are already in gmail.

I wasn’t able to get gExodus to work (smtp issues) and after looking for a lot of help I finally found Google’s Mail Fetcher. It accomplishes the same process as gExodus but works automatically. I used it to move all my old mail from one gmail account to another. But it’s not limited to that, it can grab mail from any POP account.
This was the quick a dirty alternative to trying to understand IMAP.