TRAE days

My email life as it now is; multitasking from a single point. Cool!

Right now I’m grinning from ear to ear, feeling like a girl with small bust who just came out of augmentation surgery . My life’s much more organized now, specifically email wise. As a follow up to my previous post I just upgraded, got with the IMAP movement, figured out Thunderbird and migrated fully from Yahoo Mail to Gmail.

Prior to this and after my previous post the situation I found myself in was similar to this:

How can I import old emails into Thunderbird? I am trying to import emails from ALL of my folders and subfolders into Thunderbird, however, it’s not working at all. The only mail that is imported is from my “Inbox” all other mail is stuck on my old e-mail service. It is just one e-mail account. There is the main folder, which is the INBOX where all incoming e-mail goes. Then there are a series of sub-folders. For instance, anytime I send an e-mail a copy of it is in my “Sent” folder. Also, if I get e-mails that are specifically work related or school related sometimes I send them to sub folders that I created (i.e., “School”, etc) So these folders encompass everything from the default folders of “Sent” “Draft” “Outbox” etc. and ones that I’ve created which are like “saved” and “school”. When I set up Thunderbird it only imported mail from the “Inbox” not any of the other folders. This is a school email address (that is, .edu). When it expires I don’t want to lose all of my email memories. You know, it’s kind of important.

Worried was I and so I reached out to more knowledgeable people. Oluniyi David Ajao responded with this advice:

Try using IMAP as your “server type” instead of POP. IMAP should download all your folders exactly as they appear on your webmail. Best wishes.

Yes, just like Yahoo Mail can be tweaked to work with POP it can also be tweaked to work with IMAP. Gmail explains the difference between IMAP and POP thus:

Unlike POP, IMAP offers two-way communication between your web Gmail and your email client(s). This means when you log in to Gmail using a web browser, actions you perform on email clients and mobile devices (ex: putting mail in a ‘work’ folder) will instantly and automatically appear in Gmail (ex: it will already have a ‘work’ label on that email the next time you sign in).

And so I got working. I met with success, setbacks and ultimately perfection. It took a tip from the master Bijan Soleymani himself to set me straight and towards the finishing line though.

Here’s how I did it. I first of all installed his modified Thunderbird 3 for Windows XP, found here.

Then I used this to set up:

Incoming server: imap.mail.yahoo.com (IMAP port 143)
Outgoing server: smtp.mail.yahoo.com (SMTP SSL port 465)
Username: Yahoo username@yahoo.com
Password: same as yahoo webmail

Of course remembering to select IMAP when setting up the account (add mail account).

I then set about making the Yahoo Mail to Gmail switch. This article should guide you. It did for me though copying stopped working after a while. What I did was to break every thing down into small pieces and copy batch by batch via creating new folders and then consolidating them all into one once they were into Gmail.

Voilà I’m good! I now have all my Yahoo Mails (6 years thick) into Gmail, and with Gmail’s Mail Fetcher I can operate my Yahoo account plus my other two email accounts all from my single Gmail account! Gmail is brilliantly yakpayaski!

Related posts:

1. POPs, e-mail clients and mail servers
2. I just nailed Gmail
3. Why I don’t find Facebook useful