Gmail Import

Before I was using Gmail only for private emails – now I am using it for all my daily messages. Again I had to import some of my existing mails. Bertrand has already blogged some excellent instructions on how to do that. Some things I did differently though.

For one I wanted the subject line change to be as little disturbing as possible. (Gmail so needs an overhaul of its filter facilities!!) So I just added an “_” to then end of the subject and filtered on that.

sed s"/^Subject: \(.*\)$/Subject: \1 _/" < inbox.mbox > inbox.mbox.marked

I also modified the GML script to save the state of the import. So you can hit Ctrl-C at any stage of the import and continue later on. It now also writes out an error mbox file with message that could not be imported. (I had a few that the python library failed to parse). For the mail server to use check the Gmail MX record.

dig mx gmail.com

So I used…

python ngml.py mbox inbox.mbox.marked [email protected] gsmtp183.google.com.

You can get hold of the modified GML script here.

8. June 2006 | gmail, google, mail

Octavi Fors

Does this ngml.py script fix the import date problem in Gmail message list webpage (Gmail is not able to display the actual date of reception/sending and substitutes this by the import date)?

If not, any ideas how this could be workarounded (apart from Gmail people fix this, of course)?
Mark Denovich

weird. Gmail is hosting my domain (yet another beta service from google)... so maybe that's why it works differently.
tcurdt

I tried that, too ...but did not work for me
Mark Denovich

Instead of modifying the subject, change your gmail address thusly:

say I'm uploading my oldSent folder I'd use: [email protected]

Then I'd build a filter for To: [email protected]

Torsten Curdt’s weblog

Gmail Import