Migrating from Yahoo Mail to Gmail

The Gmail service is quite impressive and I couldn't stop thinking about getting to use it on a regular basis as soon as I can.

So, I decided to copy all my Yahoo mails to Gmail. Here is how did it and the steps you need to follow:

Download mails to local drive

Since I have a paid Yahoo account (MailPlus), Yahoo allowed the e-mails to be downloaded locally. Those with free Yahoo accounts needn't go disappointed. There is YPops as well as FetchYahoo which can be used to download the mails to Thunderbird.

Convert mails to a standard format

In my case, unfortunately the files were all individual files with eml format. You may not have this issue if you downloaded directly to Thunderbird. eml2mbox script came to the rescue. How fortunate that we have scripting languages like Ruby where people can crank up something in minutes. Now I have the mails in the mbox format.

Upload mails to Gmail

Though Gmail doesn't have the upload support yet, Mark Lyon has written a nice Python script that loads e-mails in various formats like mbox and maildir to load e-mails to gmail. Thanks Mark Lyon. There was a small issue in which the emltombox.rb script didn't create the mbox file in the cleanest format. Mark Lyon anticipated this and given a switch in the utility to cater for such files. Mark's utility also takes care of properly marking the sent mails so that took care of sent mails folder also.

Mark Lyon's utility didn't run in my machine straightaway. It kept using the Tcl library in my ruby installation directory. After some digging, I turned off the TCL_LIBRARY environment setting (Windows) and the utility ran fine.

After loading the e-mails to Gmail, I tested to make sure that e-mail "conversations" were recognized by gmail. Surprisingly they weren't. The problem was that the mails I am loading were sent by my yahoo ids or pobox ids. So, I had to edit the mbox files to replace those previous ids with gmail e-mail id. I should suggest this to Mark to add it to his utility or do it myself. May be he did this step manually and forgot to mention in the web site.

Now that I have my old e-mails loaded up in gmail, I am forwarding mails to my pobox.com alais to the gmail mailbox also. I did the same with sneakemail. I still have a couple of more folders to import into gmail and that should be a breeze to do.

Now I will be checking my gmail id like once a day and send and receive mails.