I have debated doing this for a long time. Since Mac OS 10.4 came out with it’s craptastical Mail.app changes, it’s been even more tempting. I read and write a lot of email both at home and at work, and even though IMAP is just fine, there still isn’t a really good level of synchronization, especially as far as folder and contacts go. Sometimes you need your mail and you need it right now. There’s a few main problems that I have personally struggled with, and I think have overcome sufficiently:
- Trusting Google with my mail
- Using a web app for something so mission-critical
- Your mom is a whore
Now, as far as the third point, well, you’re going to have to figure how to deal with that yourself. But in regards to the first two, I’ve come up with a pretty good solution, that will 1) Let me keep the level of control I like and 2) also let me use gmail full time.
Basically what I’ve done is this: For years and years my email address has been the same and it’s worked pretty well. I don’t get a lot of spam, and everyone I know uses it to contact me. I also have tons of old mail and saved conversations on my machine, and anyone who has tried knows how hard it is to change addresses. Sadly, as of right now, there’s very little I can do about moving those to gmail, aside from possibly using gmail as a backup for my old Mail.app mailbox files. However, we don’t have to lose anything, either. Here’s what I did:
My gracious and kick ass web host, Segment Publishing, allows mail forwarding. Hopefully, any host who uses software from this decade does, too. I created a new email address, say, phil@fakedomainname.com. Then I added a new email forwarding rule: Forward all mail from my old address to phil@fakedomainname.com AND my gmail address. Then I changed my local mail.app rules to grab mail from phil@fakedomainname.com instead of my real address, and voila. We’ve got the best of both worlds, here:
- I get to keep the email address I’ve had for a decade
- I get a sweet webmail client that has all new messages and so on
- I get a local “disaster” backup of all my mail (using Mail.app, still) in case google turns evil or explodes
- Your mom is seriously a slut, dude
So it’s win-win-win. No more reading mail twice, no more searching for something on one machine from the other, no more creating multiple folders on multiple machines. Life is good.
Shawn Medero wrote:
August 26th, 2005 at 1:10 pm
Sadly importing your old email into google is not this easy. Well, it is easy (like your mom) but you lose the original date associated with each email. Gmail needs an mbox import.