These days I'm pretty organised within my digital domain. My bookmarks are all sorted by Diigo, my computer indexed by Google Desktop, important paperwork scanned and OCR'd and backed up. I've even had people compliment me on how quickly I can find information. Stark contrast to the state of my non-digital documents which I normally have to hunt through for hours to find a note I wrote last week.
In spite of this, my e-mail is, to be quite fair, a complete mess. My mum, bless her, has her inbox better organised than me. So I decided yesterday that it was time to do some serious spring cleaning of the old e-mail system. After all, e-mail, for all its insecurities and shortcomings, is still a vital part of both my business and my social calendar. Up until now I've been running my own IMAP server, which pulls down mail from my Yahoo and ISP e-mail accounts and makes it readable on whichever particular PC I happen to be using at the time. This system worked fine for the most part, but requires the PC running the mail server to be left on. External IMAP access was possible over the internet, but just watching the number of hack attempts on that port through my firewall made me feel a little uneasy, though moving the port to something random helped a lot. External access was also fairly slow from a lot of places. Researching alternatives, I noticed Google mail offered to do everything I needed, plus give me a snazzy web interface. Sure, there are privacy concerns with a service that seems geared to archive every email you ever write, but to be fair, you can't expect a great deal of privacy from any kind of e-mail unless you use PGP.
So that was the plan, move to Google Mail and sort out the mess that was my inbox. Starting with an inbox clogged with around 4000 messages, I decided to do some serious pruning and cleaning before I tried moving to Google Mail. I've always used Thunderbird for my IMAP email reading, it's way faster than Outlook. Firstly, I decided I would archive any e-mail over two years old. You might ask why I would want to keep mail this old and to be fair I don't have a good answer to that, but storage is so cheap these days you might as well. To archive off my old messages, I used a utility called Thunderstor. With this little utility it is just a matter of copying your messages to a local folder, running the program and saving the messages to a folder of your choice. That took a dent out of my inbox, but it was still a messy pile of digital papers.
Sifting through my E-mail, I divided things up into several categories. I'd like to see more e-mail from real people in my inbox, so firstly I set up filters to move all the various automated e-mail into separate folders. Mail shots from Amazon and Play (you might consider this Spam that I am actually interested in) automatically gets sent to an "Adverts" folder. I then set up separate folders for each e-mail newsletter I was subscribed to (I really should unsubscribe from some of these). Finally, I set up a separate folder for receipts (your order has shipped, etc), Ebay and for anything to do with my websites/business. Finally, for the forums and places I read, I made a "notifications" folder for those "xyz has replied to a thread you are subscribed to" messages. Running each filter as I created it seriously thinned out my inbox. For the folders such as adverts and notifications I set the retention policy to 180 days, thus automatically pruning older messages that were of no longer of any interest or significance.
At this point I was making good headway and I decided to set up my Google Mail account. This was all relatively straightforward. Enabling IMAP was a matter of ticking an option and then adding the account to Thunderbird. Google provide walkthroughs for each step, so its pretty painless. The guide I found at lifehacker also had some handy tips. Next up was the challenge of moving messages from my existing IMAP server into Google mail. I considered Mark Lyon's Google Gmail Loader, but that messes with the timestamps on messages which was unacceptable to me. In the end I opted to add both IMAP servers into Thunderbird and move my messages manually, folder by folder.
Manually copying the messages like this was way more time consuming than I originally anticipated. Largely due to bugs in Thunderbird. Messages with no subject would not copy, setting Thunderbird into some kind of infinite loop of logging onto my Google mail account and doing nothing. Furthermore, Thunderbird frequently gave up in the middle of a copy operation, one time even insisting that my IMAP server was not an IMAP server. It took a great deal of time to copy everything, but having got that far I was determined to see it through. For the last few messages I had to switch to Outlook instead of Thunderbird, I never though that an IMAP operation would work better in Outlook than Thunderbird, but there you go. I imagine that copying masses of mail between IMAP servers is not something people do very often and so has probably not been extensively tested by the Tunderbird developers.
Finally, with my mail all safely in the hands of mother Google (stop sniggering at the back, I already said you can't expect privacy for your emails unless you use PGP!) there was just the matter of bringing my existing Thunderbird message filters across to the new account. Fortunately this is easy as pie. Thunderbird stores filters in a plain text file called “msgFilterRules.dat”. It's in your thunderbird profile folder (on XP that's somewhere near C:\Documents and Settings\Bucko\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\(random characters here).default. Making the filters work on the new server was just a matter of a simple search and replace for the server name and bingo, next time Tunderbird started the new filters were in place.
So, a slightly more painful transition than I had anticipated, but now things are running nicely and I can't imagine going back to my old system. I notice a handy add-on for Firefox called "FireGPG" that even allows you to use GPG with Google Mails web interface. Would be nice to install this to my Ironkey to provide a portable GPG e-mail solution. Maybe I'll post again when I get that working. In the meantime, feel free to drop me a mail, if you know my address ;)
