Saturday, 27 September 2008

Migration to Google Mail

Although I've had a Google Mail account for a few years, I've really only used it as a test account, or when I've not had access to my personal email. Instead, my main (church) email address has been accessed by Thunderbird on my local machine. Obviously this is not ideal from a cloud computing perspective.

So tonight I took the step of migrating all my email from Thunderbird to Google. I did this using the IMAP interface to Gmail and dragging and dropping messages up to the cloud.

In order to ensure that all new messages go to Google, I configured Gmail to download my email using POP. I've also got the webmaster account on a Google Apps domain for a local charity, which I've now changed to forward to Gmail.

The net result was an inbox with > 1700 messages and taking 325MB (out of a quota of 7178MB).

The next step was to use the Gmail filter capabilities to add tags for my emails based on destination email address. Once this was done, I spent a couple of minutes archiving all email older than 1 month.

Now I have a tidy inbox, accessible from everywhere I can use a browser, collecting email from three different addresses and automatically tagging incoming messages.

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