The times they are a-changin’.
This post seems to be older than 15 years—a long time on the internet. It might be outdated.
First, I want to say that before I started all this, I had about 70 emails in my inbox, all of them read. I now have over a 1000 emails in my inbox and almost all of them unread.
In any event, I have this folder on my desktop called “july2006” which basically has a bunch of files in it from when I (presumably) reformatted by hard drive in July of 2006 (natch). For whatever reason, I also have this file that has over 100MB of email that, from what I can tell, spans from late 2005 to July 2006.
The trouble was, I couldn’t figure out a good way to get the emails (which are actually stored in a single file per mbox standard) to Gmail.
The issue was actually that I hadn’t looked. So I did and easily found two programs that worked (with a bit of tweaking), even though they haven’t been updated in several years.
The first one I came across was Mark Lyon’s Google GMail Loader. I download it and tried to get it to work, but it barfed with an error. So I moved on and found gExodus by Chu Yeow. It also barfed.
As it turned out, it was an easy fix. Both programs used the same Gmail SMTP server that I couldn’t access (either because it was offline or because of a firewall issue on my end). I ended up just plugin in my school’s SMTP address and using that since it allows for unauthenticated access from within our campus.
That fixed the issue for both of the programs.
I ended up using gExodus because it allows you to pause the process, which seemed like a good option to have.
It’s imported 2273 emails so far and it’s still going. Ugh. This is going to suck to clean out my inbox.
Update: It finished around 7:44pm MDT after taking about 2 hours and 15 minutes to import around 4500 emails. However, my inbox only reads around 2300 new emails. I surmise that many pieces of spam were filtered out and some messages were threaded (because Google is awesome).
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