Getting your mail from GMail into Outlook is pretty straight forward, Google wrote some neat documentation on getting mail through POP (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) into Outlook or whichever mail client you prefer to use.On the flip side, who is still using the old outdated way of accessing their mail through desktop email clients? GMail offers you a free email account with a stunning interface and the option of accessing your mail through a well developed cellphone client running on any phone supporting JAVA and the option of importing mail from other POP enabled email accounts compared to the expensive solution of downloading every single mail into Outlook and needing a Windows Phone / PDA to download mail and synchronizing it with your Outlook account.
There are two ways of getting your Outlook mail into GMail, the tricky way is setting up a local mail server using the Mercury Email Server and getting GMail to do a POP fetch through through your local email server, Ben Shoemate wrote a long blog entry on this method here. Some of the problems I experienced with this method is firewalls interfering the whole time, especially the firewall on my D-Link router. Due to my laziness, I opted for the brute force method, if anyone has done it this way before, leave a comment and share your experience.
The brute force method is simply forwarding all the mails to your GMail account, but it gets a little more complicated when a client asks you to get 1600+ / 250MB+ of email from Outlook into his GMail account!
Fortunately, somebody was determined enough to write some software to do this, all hail the Google Mail Loader!!! A simple piece of Python script interfacing through TK developed by Mark Lyon.
The procedure is simple, convert your Outlook PST file into the MBOX format, load it up with GML and get yourself a Martini while you wait. The easiest way of getting your Outlook mail into the MBOX format is simply importing all your Outlook mail into Thunderbird and moving all your mail into the default Thunderbird Inbox.
Once you have all your mail in one place, exit and look for the Inbox file, I’m using portable Thunderbird for this experiment / job, found my Inbox file in “ThunderbirdRoot\Data\profile\Mail\Local Folders\Inbox”
Fire up GML and start filling in the fields, the SMTP server settings you can change to the same settings your Outlook is using for its outgoing mail, the default SMTP server didn’t work for me, the Email File referred to is the “Inbox” file generated by Thunderbird, File Type you need to play with, the mBox Less Strict option worked well for me, the Message Type is whether you want the mail you’re sending to end up in your GMail inbox or Sent Items and the last field is the destination GMail account.
The errors you’re seeing is mail blocked by AVAST Anti Virus due to Trojans and Viruses lurking in the attachments, unfortunately the power went out just before I got the chance to save the log file, could only get a screen shot before my UPS’ batteries started running low, damn Eskom and their load shedding nonsens :(
