I recently helped my mother with switching over to Gmail. She has always used the webmail service from our webhost with an e-mail adress at amazoneadvies.nl (she runs a dutch PR consultancy) but the webmail service had been buggy lately. Setting up Gmail to receive e-mail from another account with POP3 access is easy but I was getting worried when I noticed the mail that she had put in folders wasn’t coming through. When I went googling for a clue I found the Gmail answer to this problem:
You’re only receiving mail from the inbox of your other account and not from any folders. Each webmail provider determines which messages to make available for POP download and sends a list of the messages to Gmail. Since Gmail can’t retrieve any messages that aren’t on the list, we suggest contacting your other provider to learn about alternatives.
I didn’t really feel like doing it this way, it meant waiting for our hosting provider to respond and everything. Plus I wasn’t convinced that Gmail would automatically label the messages with the folder name. So I had to come up with another solution.
Gmail allows you to access your e-mail through IMAP which means that you can access your mail with a standard desktop e-mail client like Mozilla Thunderbird. Every change you make in Thunderbird (such as deleting a message) will reflect in your Gmail as well (in contrast to making changes with POP3 access). Our hosting company provides IMAP access as well. What I did was the following:
I turned on IMAP access in Gmail and configured Thunderbird so I could access my mother Gmail (read all about it). Then I created another account in Thunderbird to access her mailbox at our hosting provider (the one the still held some mail in folders). After doing this I could easily create folders for Gmail in Thunderbird (Gmail converts them to labels automatically) that match the folders at our hosting provider. After that I could simply drag and drop all the mail from the hosting provider to Gmail (hold [CTRL] while dragging and dropping to copy instead of move). Voila!
This way all the e-mail that was archived in folders at our hosting provider now appears under matching labels in Gmail.
Vincent Smith zegt:
Hello Walter!
I don’t know if I’m contacting the right sort of person, but I have a current problem with my 20 inch App;e MAC, which is running OSX Tiger (10.4.11). Recently, for some inexplicable reason, both my Safari browser application and the built-in Apple Mail Application refuse to open. When I click on their icons in the task bar, the icons just bounce three times, but nothing happens. The reason this is a problem (particularly with the email client), it that I now have no access to email that I have already received, and some of them have registration codes, etc for installed applications. I need somehow to retrieve these and I wondered if Gmail can do this. I have Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client installed at the moment, but it can only import contacts, and (it would appear) not email mbox folders (unless I’ve misunderstood that). I managed to literally open both the Apple Mail client’s mail folder and then copy and paste them into the Thunderbird equivalent, but in the Thunderbird mailbox column list, they appear but they have nothing in them! However, I have noticed that along with the folders that were copied and pasted from the Apple Mail application, their are other “folders” listed as “info plist’, but there is nothing in them either. So, I need to retrieve both the mailboxes and their contents, and also my inbox contents. Any ideas?
Kind Regards,
Rev. Vince Smith.
November 19th, 2009
Walter Vos zegt:
Sorry to disappoint you Vince, but I don’t think I am the right person to ask this. Perhaps contact Apple?
November 19th, 2009
Phillip Kaplan zegt:
Works great, Thunderbird actually lets you have two gmail accounts “talk” to each other easier than Google does.
However, for setting up the latest version of Thunderbird, 3.0, Google has not updated the ingoing/outgoing server setup properly.
Incoming always needs to be imap.googlemal.com, port 993, DON’T check the SSL box.
Outgoing always needs to be smtp.googlemail.com, port 465, CHECK “secure authentication”
This page is helpful, though as I indicated, the ingoing/outgoing servers are incorrect.:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78799
December 17th, 2009
Maz zegt:
Hi,
I have a 7gig pst file that i want to pull into gmail or thunderbird or any such email program. Is it possible?
Thanks
MAZ
April 12th, 2010
Walter Vos zegt:
Sorry Maz, I have no idea. Hopefully Google can answer your question!
April 22nd, 2010