29 October 2008 by Lars
Archiving email in Gmail
Finally found the trick – how to move 5 years worth of Thunderbird email archive into Gmail as an online searchable archive (privacy concerns set aside). I tried this before, but somehow it didn’t work quite as smoothly. Here’s the step-by-step
- Create a gmail account (for now, no mixing with the regular email account)
- Copy the Mail/ directory (where Thunderbird keeps its mail) to Mail-dovecot/
- Install dovecot (openSUSE: zypper install dovecot)
- Modify /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf:
mail_location = mbox:~/Mail-dovecot - Start dovecot
- Download and compile imapsync
- Start syncing with something like this:
imapsync –host1 z –user1 myuser –passfile1 /path/to/passfile1 \
–host2 imap.gmail.com –user2 myarchive@gmail.com \
–passfile2 /path/to/passfile2 –ssl2 –split1 1000 - Sit back, and do something else. At the time of this writing, imapsync had transferred 10,000 email messages into Gmail in about 9 hours.
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