Yesterday after fighting with Thunderbird yet again, I decided to take the plunge and switch my email over to GMail. Jeanine has been using GMail exclusively for over two years (I think it’s been that long now) ever since her last Outlook crash. I wasn’t ready for GMail then and GMail wasn’t ready for me. It’s come a long way in the past two years.
I don’t know if I like the idea of storing my personal emails on an online/public server. But I do like the idea of being able to access them wherever without having to know all my individual email passwords off the top of my head. I have always kept a folder of passwords to my various hosting accounts and clients hosting accounts in Thunderbird. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to move those emails over to GMail or not. I’m probably just being paranoid as everything is out there these days – much more bothersome than some hosting passwords.
I spent a good chunk of time researching yesterday how to move my existing email over. I periodically remove old e-mails (like once a year) where I go through a serious purge. But on a daily basis, I’m not so good at regularly deleting crap I don’t need. With GMail, I already see that changing – select ALL – DELETE – is a very nice option. LOL!
After going back and forth with a few “programs” that would import e-mail into GMail, I decided to opt for using Thunderbird to do the import. I setup an IMAP account for my GMail account in Thunderbird. I could see all the GMail “labels” and I was able to create new ones on the fly right from Thunderbird. Then it was a matter of drop/dragging the folders and e-mails right into the GMail labels. The process went rather smoothly. I created filters on the GMail side as I went along and this morning have been creating some new ones on the fly as I receive e-mails. The process has been remarkably painless for me.
I usually group my e-mails by e-mail account – all KV e-mails, go under the KV account, all libracorn e-mails go under the libracorn account, etc. I’ve been account based for years to help keep track of which e-mail address is receiving which e-mail. I started doing the same with GMail – creating a master label named my email account and work from there. But after organizing for a bit, I decided that I really do not need to go that route anymore. So I broke everything out and started labeling more by content than account.
For instance, I have some newsletters come to my main comcast address, some come to my KV and some to my libracorn. Now I have a master Newsletters label and under that each label by type. Most people probably do this – and I did this to a point when I was account based. But the mentality is really different and it takes a bit getting used to.
Now, GMail does allow you to label incoming e-mails right off – so theorectially, I could label them by the TO account and put them all into a label based on that. The problem with that is then I’ll have the e-mail under two labels which makes it appear as two copies. I want to be able to SKIP the inbox and file right away into the type of content. I was surprised that it didn’t take long for me to fall into this pattern. I have tried it again and again over the years – and it was the primary reason I liked Thunderbird. I don’t know why it felt right to my brain this time but it did. 🙂
Enough of my babble… some cool GMail things I discovered that helped me.
1. Importing via Thunderbird was immensely helpful. It was just drop and drag and viola e-mails moved. Now, I’m not sure you could do this if you had thousands and thousands of e-mails to move.
2. I like sub-labels and sub-sub labels. I do not like the way GMail names them on the left. For instance, I have a LISTS label and below it SCRAPBOOKING and below it folders for the individual groups I sub to. GMail by default will show this as
LISTS/SCRAPBOOKING/P4D
and it gets cut off and all you see is
LISTS/SCRAPBO
LISTS/SCRAPBO
LISTS/SCRAPBO
LISTS/SCRAPBO
So I found this cool Firefox add-on to make the GMail labels drop-down – or work like nested folders. You have to install GreaseMonkey to use it. The add-on is called “Folders4Gmail“.
So the above looks like
Where you can open/close each main folder.
So far my move to GMail has been successful and I won’t have Thunderbird hogging resources, locking up and giving various errors every time it checks e-mails (which was getting highly annoying).
3. Add-on to put a “Refresh POP3 Accounts” on the inbox. When you click it, it’ll refresh all your POPs in one shot.
4. Add-on to make the side navigation panel wider. I have a wide monitor and would like the left nav a little wider to see my labels better. I manually edited the JS file though and changed ‘180’ to ’50’ in both spots as 180 was a bit too wide.