redemption in a blog

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!

Posted by: Daniel Bishop on June 23, 2004 5am

Now THERE’s putting a gmail invite/account into good use! Better than anything I’ve done with it (which is using it for, you know, e-mail…). Bravo! You make me proud ;)

Posted by: Luke on June 23, 2004 12pm

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

Posted by: Alex C-G on June 23, 2004 6pm

Note that you can create Gmail filters to automatically apply its own labels to your incoming mail. So if your [yahoo-personal] added in the subject line you can apply the label “yahoo-personal” and move the mail to your archive automatically. Great work.

Posted by: Rory Parle on June 23, 2004 9pm

ah, weekends
in the websphere, redemption in a blog has released version 0.2 of his mbox-to-gmail importing utility, gexodus. it will take your mozilla mail or thunderbird mailbox files and import them into your gmail account. haven’t tried it yet, still waiting …

Posted by: ramblinations on June 24, 2004 3am

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?

Posted by: Eric Vitiello on June 24, 2004 5am

have you tried it w/o adding the extension?

Posted by: Daniel Bishop on June 24, 2004 7am

yes, that’s how I tried it to begin with, and thought maybe it wanted an extension :)

Posted by: Eric Vitiello on June 24, 2004 8am

I am having the same problem as Eric … has gmail managed to block the import route?

Posted by: mtn on June 24, 2004 9am

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.

Posted by: Cheah Chu Yeow on June 24, 2004 9am

WFM, both versions 0.1 and 0.2, with and without labels and with the default smtp server.

Oddly, though, it uploaded some emails that I had deleted. Thunderbird must leave them in the mailbox until you compress the folder. If I haven’t thrown too many feature requests at you already could you add checking to see if the mail has been deleted before uploading? There are plenty more version numbers before 1.0 ;-)

One more thing. Did you actually hear Futurama’s coming back, or was that just an example? That would be about the coolest thing that could possibly happen to the world right now.

Posted by: Rory Parle on June 24, 2004 9am

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.

Posted by: mtn on June 24, 2004 10am

From this Wired article:

Last year, Futurama and Family Guy reruns did so well that it’s likely both shows (which Fox killed in prime time) will produce new episodes.

I’ll have to look into that, how Thunderbird handles deletes. Does anyone know this already?

Posted by: Cheah Chu Yeow on June 24, 2004 10am

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.

Posted by: Eric Vitiello on June 24, 2004 10pm

It seems Thunderbird just adds X-Mozilla-Status headers to the mail to mark different statuses (an explanation of X-Mozilla-Status). So you would have to check these headers for the ‘deleted’ status (MSG_FLAG_EXPUNGED = 0×0008). They should probably be removed aswell, since they’re just a hack and not part of the original mail’s headers.

Posted by: Rory Parle on June 25, 2004 12am

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.

Posted by: Rory Parle on June 25, 2004 12am

Very cool. I look forward to trying it out. Note that you can get around the label issue by forwarding messages to “myname+label”, and then searching for “+label”.

(Gmail allows you unlimited “+” addresses. For example, all my mail that’s forwarded from an external account goes to mygmailname+forward@gmail.com)

-Danyel

Posted by: Danyel Fisher on June 25, 2004 10am

Yeah Yeah.. Another Gmail Post…
It seems like every blog author is talking about their experiences with Gmail. Right now I’m using gExodus 0.2 to archive a couple of years worth of mail and it is a most efficient program which I highly recommend. A lot of people are paranoid about t…

Posted by: justelise.org on June 25, 2004 1pm

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

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

Posted by: Cheah Chu Yeow on June 25, 2004 11pm

I think the label feature is more user friendly than supplying a different address. It also allows you to put +signs in your labels! That is a useful tip though, where did you find it?

Posted by: Rory Parle on June 26, 2004 1am

Nice one Chu…first imports successfully completed…

Ingo

Posted by: Ingoal on June 29, 2004 3am

Okay, I’m having problems. I’ve gotten a good mbox of my email, but every time I try to import it into gmail, I get:

Cannot connect to SMTP server.

I use the 57 and 171 servers (the only ones listed in the MX record lookup), but it never works. Any suggestions?

Posted by: Will on July 1, 2004 2am

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!

Posted by: Tjgriff on July 15, 2004 12am

First, awesome tool! Still trying to figure out the best way to work this, though. The name+label@gmail.com seems ideal (I would rather not change the subject on all my messages), except that I can’t seem to use Gmail’s search to filter out the imported messages. The gmail address shows up in the headers, but not in any searchable field. Am I missing something?

Posted by: jaytee on July 23, 2004 3pm

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.

Posted by: Rory Parle on July 23, 2004 3pm

thanks for the quick reply! the problem is, the “to” field doesn’t contain my gmail address. it contains the original to field of the original message. the only place i see the labeled gmail address is if i open up the original headers.

Posted by: jaytee on July 23, 2004 10pm

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.

Posted by: Rory Parle on July 23, 2004 10pm

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…

Posted by: hatch.org on July 30, 2004 6am

I wanted an archive of my IMAP folders on Gmail, I was using Outlook Express.

I still want my imap folders intact though, so I copied the imap mail to the local folders in outlook express. Then downloaded Firebird imported my local outlook express folders and uploaded to gmail. Well I tested with 300 messages first and that worked fine. I have about 5000 to upload and wil do that some time tomorrow. Glad I ran the test first, hadnt setup filters properly etc, but thanks for the nifty piece of software worked a charm.

PS Gmail users- dont forget to use sensible passwords - Gmail Hacker has been released (see my homepage for details)

Posted by: Andrew Bonar on August 11, 2004 10am

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.

Posted by: Erik Kallevig on August 13, 2004 11pm

Is the link to gExodus broken? I’m a sad puppy who would like to start archiving his mail inside of GMail, but I can’t even Download the app :(

Posted by: Nate on August 27, 2004 1pm

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. :)

Posted by: Nate on August 31, 2004 2pm

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?

Posted by: Prashant on September 4, 2004 7am

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.

Posted by: Felix on September 7, 2004 4am

For some reason, when importing my thunderbird mbox file, gExodus stops after 40 mails processed and does not export the rest (21000 messages or so). Any way of diagnosing?

Thanks!
–Josh

Posted by: Josh Wand on September 19, 2004 11pm

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.

Posted by: Thomas Rice on October 16, 2004 1am

Hi,

I was wondering if you could add a port option for the outgoing (SMTP) server. My ISP blocks the standard port (25), but they do allow SMTP on port 80.

Thanks!

Posted by: alopecoid on October 22, 2004 10am

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

Posted by: Michael on October 28, 2004 4am

Great Tool!
Suggestion (if possible): To date the email by the original date.

Posted by: AaronH on October 31, 2004 7am

“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!

Posted by: Flipthedolphin on November 11, 2004 1am

Hi Cheah Chu Yeow,

Just wanted to say thanks for the nice program. I’ve imported over 70 MB of old emails into GMail using it.

I wanted to second a couple comment previously posted here,

1) I also get an ERROR: message when importing messages that have no subject. Not a big problem since it is easy to filter for these messages and import by hand.

2) The recurse multiple directories feature request or the ability to set the 3 (4 optional) parameters via the commandline. Writing a small shell script to recurse the directories and run a new instance of gExodus for each mBox file found would then be trivial.

Regards,

IC

Posted by: IC on December 31, 2004 2pm

I too get the

Cannot connect to SMTP server

message, what should i do?

Posted by: Fake on February 16, 2005 7am

Thanks for this great utility. Yesterday, I moved over 2,000 messages from Mozilla to Gmail, without a hitch. For me, gExodus enhances the functionality of Gmail, since I can avail myself of Gmail’s search and other capabilities, while retaining my accumulated message base.

Posted by: Julio A Juncal on February 22, 2005 8pm

How do you import mail from Yahoo?

Posted by: Julio A Juncal on February 25, 2005 9am

i cannot connect to the smtp server anymore — at one time this did work, but no longer. does anyone know what happened?

ive tried gmail loader too with the same results. its like google is blocking trafffic from certain applications. heres the error message:

*** UNABLE TO CONNECT TO SERVER OR SEND MESSAGE. ERROR FOLLOWS.
Error Type: socket.error
Error Val : (10060, ‘Operation timed out’)

has anyone else seen this error?

Posted by: quentincompson on March 22, 2005 8pm

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

Posted by: Sachin on April 1, 2005 9pm

On Windows XP here. When I double click on the executable, nothing happens. Suggestions?

Posted by: bwana on April 13, 2005 6am

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

Posted by: bwana on April 13, 2005 6am

Great application, works fine. Thank you .

The only problem is the date of the original is not maintained in gmail :-( Can this be resolved?

Cheers
Smash

Posted by: smashari on August 28, 2005 10pm

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.

Posted by: Whisky on January 6, 2006 4am

I just imported 197 emails successfully into my Gmail account. The e-mails came from Pegasus mail. Procedure: Create a new folder in Pegasus mail using the Unix Mbox format and copy over all mails you want to import into Gmail. Then search for the file with extension .mbx and import it using gExodus. Works smoothly! Keep up the good work! Bart

Posted by: Bart Claeys on February 15, 2006 8pm

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

Posted by: sam on February 22, 2006 8am

Wow worked perfect. I have a busted Exchange server, so I access my email over IMAP through Outlook. So to import to gmail I Opened Outlook Express, it auto imported all my IMAP folders into itself.

Then I tracked down the folder with all the .dbx files that OE created and converted them to mbox with this: http://people.freenet.de/ukrebs/dbxconv.html (thanmks for the pointer to that!).

Then I ran gExodus and was able to easily import all the emails. Perfect!

Posted by: Chuck Cheeze on February 27, 2006 9am

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?

Posted by: David Russell on February 28, 2006 3am

Mine stops importing after 265 messages. Repeatedly. :(

Posted by: matt on March 1, 2006 10am

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.

Posted by: VSZ on April 6, 2006 1am

Is it possible to keep the original date of the emails?

Posted by: travis on April 6, 2006 9pm

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”.

Posted by: Fedor on May 5, 2006 3am

WARNING!!!!!!

don’t use this with PostCast Server - somehow the original TO and/or CC addresses are picked up and mail gets resent.

Very embarrasing.

WARNING!!!!!!

(works fine to get mail from Tbird to Gmail mind… hope it’s just Postcast…)

Posted by: Tony Crockford on May 18, 2006 3pm

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…

Posted by: Guy Gordon on May 19, 2006 3pm

I also am interested in importing my email into the Gmail hosted account. Let me know if you add that functionality. Thanks!

Posted by: William on May 23, 2006 5am

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

Posted by: Horst G. on June 15, 2006 8pm

I have one feature request (if this thing hasn’t died!) and one “hack” for those of you wanting to use this on a Google Hosted Domain Account!

The hack first as I was trying to figure out a way to do this, Mark Lyon’s tool kept giving me Tk errors and that’s over my head, and then I just had the simple idea of doing this:

blah@hostedgmaildomain.com #

Yeah, I threw in the hash mark at the end. after that, the e-mails sent in fine! No problems here! Not sure if that successfully commented out the gmail.com part, but it works and I haven’t had any wonky e-mails yet!

As for the feature request, is there a way, like Mark’s utility, to choose to upload messages to the Sent folder? I want to archive ALL of my e-mails, to and from myself. If this is already a feature and I just haven’t stumbled on it yet, apologies :).

Thanks for a great utility!!!

Posted by: Gary on June 17, 2006 5am

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?

Posted by: Jirka Cech on June 29, 2006 5pm

Can you update this so that it will work with Gmail’s new hosted accounts? All I need to do is be able to use a domain other than @gmail.com for this to work with my Gmail hosted account. Thanks!

Posted by: Marcus on July 26, 2006 5am

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?

Posted by: Grace on December 22, 2006 2pm

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??

Posted by: Anon on January 10, 2007 10am

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??

Posted by: Anon on January 10, 2007 10am

Thanks for the great tool! I am in the middle of uploading several thousand messages to my gmail account. I ran into the already mentioned problem of hanging on a missing subject header, but I found a way around the problem. The message file (without the extension) can be edited in notepad. After making a backup copy, I _carefully_ inserted the Subject: line header between the From: and To: headers using another message as an example of where to put it. A quick check in Thunderbird showed the new subject header showed up fine. At first, though, the upload to gmail still hung on these messages. But, after I compacted the folder in Thunderbird, it upload just fine.

Posted by: Tim Butterfield on January 10, 2007 2pm

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?

Posted by: Martijn Dekkers on February 20, 2007 9pm

Hi,

Are there any updates expected soon?

Posted by: Zachs Greene on May 9, 2007 10pm

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.

Posted by: Seth Rosenberg on July 17, 2007 9pm

Hi, I keep running into problems trying to connect to the smtp servers. I can’t connect to Google’s or my ISP… any idea why this may happen?

Thanks!

FC

Posted by: Felix on August 30, 2007 11pm

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.

Posted by: Nacho on November 1, 2007 12am

It’s very nice of you software developers to not have me enter the domain name of my gmail address (@gmail.com), but i actually would like to use your tool with google-apps which is running on my own domain. So my account name is user@myowndomain.com. Is there any way that i could use your very handy piece of software with my google apps? Thanks in advance.
Michel van Westen

Posted by: Michel van Westen on January 22, 2008 10pm