Gmail Loader
I was looking at Lifehacker today (might have to add it to the ol’ RSS list) and found a great way to add all the old emails from outlook/thunderbird to my gmail.
I’ve been using gmail for almost three years now, and it completely changed how I deal with email within a day of using it. I had given up organising my inbox (a situation I find myself in in work) with gmail that doesn’t happen, and if it did, it wouldn’t matter.
Only problem now is that I’m going to use up half my quota in one fell swoop…
March 21st, 2007 at 9:21 am
Grr.. Couldn’t get it working. I think my smtp won’t accept mail from a relay, which I guess is what the program is essentially trying to be.
Given that this is the first time I’ve tried to use an smtp server at home in about 3 years I may have gotten the log-in wrong, of course…
At least I finally got Tsuchi (my fileserver) up and running.
March 21st, 2007 at 12:46 pm
I realised that I have a similar problem where my fileserver will no longer send me email notifications (which goes to an email address that sends me a text) if/when my RAID arrays fail and start to rebuild on the hot spare, as the SMTP server requires authentication, which HighPoint’s software doesn’t appear to support. So I may have to add some sort of proxy that will somehow read the first email and send the second email (perhaps, to begin with, a rule in Outlook). Sometimes increased security can be a pain, but it should be worth it. Congrats on getting your fileserver up and running, will we see it online sometime? Seeing as you like GMail, and assuming you haven’t screwed up the login, I gather Gmail provides an SMTP server as an alternative (assuming this still works): http://lifehacker.com/software/email-apps/how-to-use-gmail-as-your-smtp-server-111166.php
March 21st, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Ooh, nice link, ta.
I should have said, authentication is the issue with smtp: the gmail tool will authenticate for you, but won’t do TLS/SSL, which our servers need to do the relay jazz.
–edit–
damn, looks like the gmail smtp needs TLS - also all of the emails would show up as sent emails, which isn’t what I want. Damn.
Doubt you’ll be seeing the fileserver anytime soon - the OS is nearly a year out of date, so that needs updating. That means I should probably migrate from an md software raid to whatever all-singing all-dancing hard drive management suite whatever linux distro I’ll be using recommends. And then I’ll have to find a decent client.
What it does mean is that I’ll be able to play in earnest with a media pc - w00t
March 21st, 2007 at 2:02 pm
//also all of the emails would show up as sent emails, which isn’t what I want//
I thought you were trying to import all your emails into Gmail? That’s why I thought you might like a suggestion that’d bring your sent mail into Gmail too. I guess they think it’s better to be secure than wide open (then again, they have enough XSS/redirect problems on their site that beg to differ).
Do your servers really require TLS? I don’t believe I’m using it to send my emails from Outlook at home, although I’d have to check.
March 21st, 2007 at 2:23 pm
they don’t require TLS, I just think they might need it to relay mail… I must admit I don’t know enough about SMTP.
I want to import sent emails as sent emails, and received emails as received emails - losing the information as to who sent which email isn’t helpful!
March 21st, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Finally got it working.
Chris pointed out that our servers will accept mail from any address to local addresses; they’ll also allow relaying from local addresses to anywhere else. I was trying to relay from a non-local IP to a non-local IP: that is I’d need a totally open smtp relay, which are Bad Things.
Of course, as soon as I relayed them to a local email address, it worked fine. That local email address was itself a relay to the gmail address, and so the path is complete.
Now all I have to do is wait for 25,000 emails to be forwarded to my gmail account at a rate of an email every 2 seconds. That’s just under 14 hours. Woot.
(by the way, gmail is great. I’ve set all incoming emails to my gmail address (which is most of the ones I’d be interested in reading) to be starred on delivery. That should help seperate them from the 25k archived emails in my inbox nicely).