illumin8's Journal: How to get your POP3 or IMAP mail into Gmail easily

For those of you that are wondering how to get mail from your IMAP or POP3 accounts into Gmail, I found a great way to do it with Fetchmail. These are the options I used:

fetchmail --all --keep \
--smtphost gsmtp57.google.com,gsmtp171.google.com \
--smtpname [e-mail] \
--protocol IMAP or POP3 \
--user yourmailserverusername \
yourmailserverhostname

Give this a try, it will prompt you for your IMAP password, then start copying away. BTW, the --keep flag tells it to keep all of your messages on your IMAP server, so it's not going to erase anything.

Some tips:

You may want to setup some Labels and Filters ahead of time on your GMail account so that you don't end up with 5000 messages in your inbox. For example messages that came from a domain name of my old employer get labelled with company name and archived automatically.

Messages will have all appropriate headers intact, however the timestamp that the messages are received will reflect the current time, rather than the original timestamp. There is no way around this because Google's SMTP servers automatically timestamp every incoming message.

There is no need to worry about MAIL FROM: headers being mangled like they would be if you forwarded them from a regular mail client. All MAIL FROM: headers will remain intact. Fetchmail only overwrites the RCPT TO: portion of the headers.

Let me know if you have any problems... Mine is currently chunking away on 850 out of 2867 messages... Gmail rocks!

ok, I give up

[elmegil]

Care to send me an invite? You have my work email :-)

Re:ok, I give up

[illumin8]

Care to send me an invite? You have my work email :-)

You know what, I've been using it for about a week now and I still haven't gotten any invites.... Damn Google and their invite lottery auction. As soon as I get some I promise to put you on the top of my list. I'll check with my brother (who invited me in the first place) and see if he has any more to give out.

GMail Invites

[B4RSK]

I have some invites if someone wants one... First come, first served... Just reply here and we can work out a way to contact.

Re:GMail Invites

[kc_cyrus]

or.... go to http://www.gmailswap.com/

Re:GMail Invites

[illumin8]

I have some invites if someone wants one... First come, first served... Just reply here and we can work out a way to contact.

I have seven invites as well. Any takers? Reply here.

Re:GMail Invites

[Xikteny]

If you happen to notice this, I'd like one.
[e-mail]

Re:GMail Invites

[B4RSK]

If you haven't got one already, let me know... I still have a bunch here.

Re:GMail Invites

[Xikteny]

Thanks anyway, I got one from illumin8.

Re:GMail Invites

[illumin8]

I just sent it. Enjoy.

Re:GMail Invites

[Xikteny]

Thanks, man.

Re:GMail Invites

[B4RSK]

I had 7 as well, but have given all away now.