Google Launches Email Importer

April 7th, 2008 (8:00am) Mike Gunderloy 6 CommentsTweet This

Many people enjoy the easy search and antispam features of GMail. But what do you do about the thousands of messages that you already have stored in your old, desktop email client? For some users, there’s a new answer: the Google Email Uploader, which processes those old mailboxes and adds their contents to your Google mailbox. The uploaded messages then become easily searchable, and the upload process preserves the folder structure of your old mailboxes.

There are some serious limitations, though: the software only works with Outlook or Thunderbird mailboxes, and only on Windows XP or Vista. It doesn’t work with regular GMail accounts, only with Google Apps for Domains. And it’s slow (and while you’re using it, you can’t have your old mail open – though you can pause the process). But if you do have your Google Apps for Domains account (or are ready to move to one), it’s one more step to moving your entire working life to online servers.

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Comments (6)

It sounds awesome. I hope it works as promised. I’m going to try it out now.

Alex Andrei — 9:53 AM on April 7, 2008 Reply
>> It doesn’t work with regular GMail accounts

damn damn damn

Colin — 10:50 AM on April 7, 2008 Reply
If you use Thunderbird with Gmail in IMAP mode and also have old POP3 mail stranded in other Thunderbird folders, you can move/copy/drag them into a Gmail IMAP folder and they will be uploaded to your Gmail account. This works best with small numbers of emails at a time, but if nothing else works then it might be worthwhile.

Elizabeth — 11:07 AM on April 7, 2008 Reply
Ditto to Elizabeth. It can work with any email clients that support IMAP. I’ve moved more than 1GB of emails to Gmail from Outlook Express. It’s rather tedious and can take long time, but you need to do this only once, and best of all, all the properties and folder structure remain unaltered. Kudos to Google for supporting IMAP!

ignar — 11:12 AM on April 7, 2008 Reply
Oh to be able to upload a PST file!

Michael — 11:45 AM on April 7, 2008 Reply
I tried it on two PCs. For some reason, they both managed to upload my contacts, but they both stalled as soon as it came time to upload emails.

In each case, they claim I stopped the process, saying it will continue next time I run it. But I have not stopped it. I have tried this many times now to no avail.

I have XP, Outlook 2007, Thunderbird and Express. The same problem occurs with them all.

Any ideas, thanks?

Dominic — 11:19 AM on May 2, 2008 Reply