On Wednesday, I took delivery of my new 3.0 Thunderbird. The classic lines I’ve grown accustomed to were still there, just a new engine underneath.
A quick spin around the neighborhood revealed the new archiving and search enhancements, prompting me to bring in all of my mail from the Google cloud.
My Gmail accounts ranged from being strictly web based, to living as POP accounts from time of creation. Web only accounts required the steps below plus a simple sort, purge and archive process, the POP accounts just needed archiving.
- Sign into each Gmail account, go to Settings, then the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
- Turn on Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded) and press Save Changes.
- Thunderbird’s Add Mail Account wizard helps you setup up your Gmail based accounts, just switch the default of IMAP to POP access.
- The newly created accounts connect to Google and begin downloading the Inbox and Sent Mail boxes, 200 to 300 messages per request.
- Set Check for new messages to 5 minutes and leave it idling.
Notes:
- Some accounts, ones that were web based then became pop based or were pop based and later dropped from the rotation, well they required a remove duplicates extension.
- The Archive button seemed a bit jumpy, so I sorted the messages by date and then selected them one year at a time before archiving them.
- With all the importing of messages and moving them around, the new search table grew to 169 megabytes. I swept away global-messages-db.sqlite from my profile and Thunderbird recreated it consuming only 26 megabytes.
IMAP is a wonderful method to keep the web based interface in sync with any device, but I use Gmail as a web archive. I don’t want local changes to affect my lifetime goal of reaching my storage quota.
Put on my CompactHeader add-on and took the Tbird out on the open road.
got Electric Windows
tilt Away Wheel
slide Across The Bucket Seat
for That Sexy Leather Feel