More Appleification and a bit of Google-Magic

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Despite switching I have retained Thunderbird as my mail client - partly because I saw some complaints about Mail.app crashing and partly because I couldn't be bothered to import all my old mail.

But Thunderbird is doing a poorer and poorer job at spam filtering (or the spammers are getting cleverer) and it's starting to get a bit irritating. In addition, mail access from my mobile device is even worse since it doesn't get the benefit of Thunderbird's filtering. Even though I have flat rate data, filtering out 100's of spam a day on a mobile screen was too much, so I stopped using it. But one of my friend's showed my his iPhone, generating instant gadget envy and I decided I really ought to mobilise my life a bit more - even without an iPhone. So some kind of server-side spam filtering was clearly needed.
Gmail is getting pretty popular as a spam filter and has done a good job on filtering my mail lists. This, and the recent addition of IMAP support has made it a very attractive solution.

Forwarding all my email accounts to gmail pretty quickly proved the superiority of gmail's filters. It looks like there might be a point to my Vario-II after all.

I then set up IMAP access for my laptop, but to avoid confusion during a test period used mail.app to access them, rather than Thunderbird. I also turned off mail.app junk mail processing, since Gmail should be a handling it and it can otherwise cause conflicts. This also effected a switch to mail.app, which means Tamzin will no longer ask "why don't I have Thunderbird" as if I was keeping some choice morsel from her and I will also be able to help her when required. I should also the benefits of increased integration between Mac applications.

At this point I thought things weren't working properly due to persistent mail activity, but it was just taking time (3 days) to sync all my stored Gmail maillist stuff.

The next step was to import all my old email into mail.app. I thought that may be Leopard's version might have sorted out Thunderbird import, especially since it had a Mozilla/Thnderbird specific import filter, but it lost a lot of email on the way in. So a bit of googling and I found the free utility Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. This has done a proper job of pulling in all the old mail.

Lastly I moved the contents of my old Inbox into the Gmail inbox so it's all in one place. I moved it in lumps of about 100 emails and found that I couldn't move an email with PDF attachments. 

So now I still have my email archived on my laptop, but I also have web-based access and mobile access to my inbox, sent items etc. I still need to sort out my address book, and there is the dual effort of moving contacts from Thunderbird to Mac Address Book and also to the Gmail contacts list.

Unfortunately Gmail doesn't automagically take care of answering, filing and actioning, so I've got a bit of GTDing to get it back under control.

Update: Major advantage to this scheme is that it makes scanning through large volumes of mail list mail much easier than the Gmail web interface. I'm starting to catch up with the ukha_d list now.

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This page contains a single entry by David published on February 2, 2008 12:59 AM.

Outdoor Sensor was the previous entry in this blog.

Completion of Mail.app Migration is the next entry in this blog.

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