[OT?] Moving to GMail

[Chuck Peters]

On 2/7/07, Amichai Rotman <amichai at iglu.org.il> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am trying to move my old mail from KMail to GMail.

I am doing something similar with a bit of mail since the mail admin
just migrated our system and screwed up my forwarding - not very good
admins...  I have a script running as I write this.

> I configured GMail in KMail - but it couldn't authenticate.
>
> I also have access to an IMAP account, so I add the IMAP account  to both
> KMail and Thunderbird 1.5 so I can transfer mail from KMail to IMAP and then
> from IMAP in Thunderbird to GMail.

I think you could setup a filter and forward with either Thunderbird
or Kmail, but you might have problems trying that with more than a few
dozen emails - gmail might think you are spaming or your mail server
won't allow it.

> Is there an easy way to do this?

Do you know the old joke about UNIX is user friendly, it's just choosy
about who its friends are.  It is easy if you know how, have the right
tools and have the right services available.  Since you are running
Ubuntu you can use procmail, formail, your mail folders should be in
mbox format and you have some way to send mail.

The short version of what I am doing is:
Spam filter and forward mail with procmail - and it has some loop
protection to attempt to avoid those nasty problems.

I should warn against trying what I am doing without knowing more
about how you send mail...  You should do some tests...  If your mail
server or smtp server doesn't allow it - you might have problems with
gmail accepting mail directly from your machine.  The method I use
sends mail from a exim4 mail server with correctly configured DNS...

One issue I heard about while surfing for solutions was that if I send
a lot of mail quickly gmail will think I am spaming and start
rejecting the mail.  So I wanted to figure out a way to send the 2000
messages slowly.

First I split the messages to individual files with a modified version
of a script I found at
http://www.mail-archive.com/clamav-users@lists.clamav.net/msg23366.html.
 I can upload it somewhere if you like.

Then create a list of the files created:
For example
ls > list

You will need a .procmailrc and .forward files which forward the mail...
cp at earth:~$ cat .forward
|/usr/bin/procmail

And a minimal .procmailrc file that doesn't include loop protection.


SHELL=/bin/sh
MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
PMDIR=$HOME/.procmail
LOGFILE=$PMDIR/log

:0
*
!example at gmail.com


Then write a little script to send the files slowly - it waits 5
seconds before sending the next message in the list.

#!/bin/sh

for item in `cat list`
do

cat $item | formail -s procmail
echo "$item"
sleep 5

done


I should note I still don't have the .procmailrc setup the way I want,
my recipe isn't forwarding the lists with loop protection.


Chuck