Trae Days

Update: After reading this and before implementing anything it’s highly recommended that you also read: IMAP, Thunderbird, Yahoo Mail and Gmail

If this post sounds like gibberish to you don’t be alarm, people have different interest and we’re probably not operating on the same frequency. Some others though could read this and be like “kini big deal?” But anyway considering the problems the issues I’m about to discuss posed for me and factoring in the time spent researching and looking for a solution I think it’s wise I put this down to help all those going forward that might be saddled with this same issue.

Props here will be going to Gmail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Google Search and the host of geeks, nerds, software developers, bloggers and helpful people online who bless the internet with useful tips here and there on ICT focused websites. While proper disrespect will accordingly be going to Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo! Mail for their shortcomings. Ok let’s go there…

It so happened recently that in one of my usual day to day sniffings around the World Wide Web I decided to finally try Gmail in-depth and as faith would have it I saw the light this time around. It was fun discovering all the cool things Gmail could do which Yahoo! Mail couldn’t. Of particular interest to me was Gmail’s Mail Fetcher feature and in exploring it is when I got reintroduced to the world of Post Office Protocol (POP). I was smitten so much by Gmail and this particular feature that I decided to consolidate all my emails into one account, the biggest task of which would be integrating my over six year old Yahoo account. Google Search always being my friend unlike the Nigerian Police and there always being so much information online from geeks and nerds alike I discovered that there was actually a way to get POP access for free Yahoo Mail accounts. And that is simply by changing your preferred content setting to Yahoo! Asia (Note: this might not work for some newly created accounts).

In the end after several tweakings and trials I decided against accessing my Yahoo Mail via Gmail and instead turned my focus to re-establishing my use of email clients which I last utilized at my former job. Microsoft Outlook being what I was used to I decided to set it up on my system. Set up was easy and automated (here’s the manual setup instructions) but little did I know that one of its default setting was that it does not leave a copy of messages on the server! Man I was screwed! On seeing my inbox depleted I felt empty as if a major part of me had been ripped out. Luckily though it had only downloaded 72 messages from my inbox before I discovered and rectified. But still the big issue now was getting those mails back to my inbox. All hope seemed lost as via research it appeared the only hope was manually resending the affected mails to myself vis-à-vis the labourious and risky option of resetting my system date and time while doing so (to get them back in their proper positions). And so I embraced Google Search some more and when it seemed like all hope was lost I finally found meaning in the phrase “Mozilla Thunderbird”.

Open source and Mozilla, the Firefox people rock! The solution was to be found on Mozilla Thunderbird (an alternative email client) via its “Mail Redirect” Add-on. I simply followed this tutorial but with the additional tweak of doing so with the current versions of Mozilla Thunderbird and its “Mail Redirect” Add-on. (After installation I first of all synced it with the downloaded messages on Microsoft Outlook, then I set up/added my mail account followed by the actual redirecting). And everything was back to normal! The only difference spotted being the Return-Path and Resent-From values in the full email header. This though is largely insignificant. And consequently I lived happily ever after.

the summary