After finally geting sick of having to manage two separate ways of viewing the same pieces of mail, I broke down and tried to find a way to transfer my e-mail into Gmail without causing too much pain. I found it in the form of Mark Lyon’s GMail Loader (GML).

I still wish IMAP had been available. GML doesn’t import messages quite the way you would expect — the date information is preserved, as is the sender information, but GMail displays the recieved date as being whatever time the e-mail was imported. Thus, messages from 2004 are now all labeled as being received within the last few days.

Most of the mail seems to have imported flawlessly, but I’m still confirming every message, just to be sure – pulling it up in GMail, then finding the copy of the message on Thunderbird. It’s a tedious process, but worth it in my eyes.

This has also allowed me to forward my Evergreen account and make my GMail account the only one I have to check, period. This might mean some updating of records in various places, but that’s okay. Hopefully, this makes everything a little easier.