major geekitude
I've been keeping archives of personal email that I've received since early undergraduate days. Every once in a while, I get an overwhelming urge to unify it with the rest of my mail (now handily searchable in my gmail account), by uploading it into gmail. The first time I was so possessed, a few months back, I tried using thunderbird to do this:
Convert it form Babyl format to (emacs RMAIL) mbox format.
Install thunderbird.
Load it into thunderbird.
Enable imap on my gmail account.
Set up thunderbird as a client of my gmail account.
Drag and drop the mail into my gmail account using thunderbird.
That worked wonderously well, except when it didn't (mysterious messages missing, imap errors on gmail's side because of a sucky imap implementation), etc.
This past weekend, I decided to try the more reliable-sounding method, of running the program "imapsync", which has all sorts of lovely options (like rate throttling, clean restarts, etc). The problem (and the reason I didn't do this last time), was that it requires you sync your mail from one imap server to another, and my mail wasn't at an imap server. Furthermore, I didn't have an imap server for my mail. It being a slow weekend, I decided to turn my mac laptop into an imap server (dovecot), upload my email to it, and then use it for the sync. This, of course, required that I download innumerable numbers of tools, source code, perl, packages, and everything else on the planet (why, I ask, did I have to install lynx? because one of the tools that downloads packages requires it), not to mention become an "apple developer" so I could download xcode (who knew my laptop didn't have 'make' installed?). gpg? of course. openssl? yes, please. ftp? mais oui.
It's not working perfectly (messages are showing up in my gmail account, but there are occasional errors, and I haven't figured out if any are missing yet or not), but I'm shocked it's working as well as it has.
Did I mention that at the start of the weekend, I didn't even know how to properly install dmg files?
Convert it form Babyl format to (emacs RMAIL) mbox format.
Install thunderbird.
Load it into thunderbird.
Enable imap on my gmail account.
Set up thunderbird as a client of my gmail account.
Drag and drop the mail into my gmail account using thunderbird.
That worked wonderously well, except when it didn't (mysterious messages missing, imap errors on gmail's side because of a sucky imap implementation), etc.
This past weekend, I decided to try the more reliable-sounding method, of running the program "imapsync", which has all sorts of lovely options (like rate throttling, clean restarts, etc). The problem (and the reason I didn't do this last time), was that it requires you sync your mail from one imap server to another, and my mail wasn't at an imap server. Furthermore, I didn't have an imap server for my mail. It being a slow weekend, I decided to turn my mac laptop into an imap server (dovecot), upload my email to it, and then use it for the sync. This, of course, required that I download innumerable numbers of tools, source code, perl, packages, and everything else on the planet (why, I ask, did I have to install lynx? because one of the tools that downloads packages requires it), not to mention become an "apple developer" so I could download xcode (who knew my laptop didn't have 'make' installed?). gpg? of course. openssl? yes, please. ftp? mais oui.
It's not working perfectly (messages are showing up in my gmail account, but there are occasional errors, and I haven't figured out if any are missing yet or not), but I'm shocked it's working as well as it has.
Did I mention that at the start of the weekend, I didn't even know how to properly install dmg files?