Comments on: How to Migrate Emails from Maildir to Gmail

By: Tob

Tob — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 10:11:56 +0000

Thanks for this very handy script!

A very easy fix for the IMAP folder GMail Labels correspondence problem described by Konstantin is to comment out lines 22 and 23, i.e.

# else:
# self.folder = ‘[Gmail]/%s’ % self.folder

This prevents the script from prepending the [Gmail] string to the folder name which makes the e-mail show up under the specified label instead.

I you have a look at Gmails IMAP tree using a mail client like thunderbird, you see that labels are folders directly at the root, while the “real” folders like “All Mail” are subfolders of [Gmail].

By: Konstantin

Konstantin — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 17:32:52 +0000

Thank you for providing this extremely helpful script!!! It allows me to complete an important item that had been on my to-do list for three years: importing all or most of my pre-Gmail email.

The script occasionally aborts when there is an error in a specific message. In those cases, I simply delete the message in question and rerun the script. It then continues to upload the remaining messages. I have not run into any other problems.

All my old mail was meticulously organized in folders. Therefore, for each Gmail label, I perform a separate import of the corresponding maildirs. I then perform a complex query (using the before: operator, among others) to isolate the recently imported messages and label them. Then I append to the complex query a negation of that label.

The whole process is taking several days requiring infrequent intervention. But we are talking about ten years of mail taking up over 5GB.

By: Nick C

Nick C — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:35:48 +0000

as a follow-up, this is likely not due to your script, as I get the same error with a couple of other scripts I’ve tried, all of which are correctly parsing the date from the maildir files, and correctly setting the time when appending the message to the imap message list (yours does this too.) This always happens on the same messages, for all scripts, so I suspect the issue may somehow be at Google’s end (particularly given their warning about that problem likely occurring when uploading messages via imap.)

By: Nick C

Nick C — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:35:17 +0000

This *mostly* worked – interestingly, the dates on a small minority of the uploaded emails weren’t preserved, and were instead dated with the date of the import rather than the date the email was sent. This only happens for a small percentage of the emails (say around 5%), but is still annoying enough for me to not use the script (others may be less bothered though.)

Still, thanks a lot for posting your solution online!

By: HellMind

HellMind — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:17:18 +0000

How do I know if that append is a success :(

By: HellMind

HellMind — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:09:21 +0000

My fix :=> self.imap.append(‘INBOX’,

By: HellMind

HellMind — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:04:26 +0000

[00:06:52]: Connected to Gmail IMAP
06:52.20 > CNPK2 APPEND “[Gmail]/All Mail” (\Seen) “11-Mar-2009 13:06:36 +0100″ {231839}
06:52.24 < + go ahead
06:52.24 write literal size 231839
06:52.84 CNPK3 LOGOUT
06:52.90 < * BYE LOGOUT Requested
06:52.90 BYE response: LOGOUT Requested
06:52.90 < CNPK3 OK 73 good day (Success)

By: HellMind

HellMind — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:40:30 +0000

There is no error.
But my gmail is clean
What’s wrong
How can I debug this?

By: Mr JM

Mr JM — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:54:31 +0000

I was contemplating moving to Gmail for a while, but did not want to give up 10 years of .maildir folder…

That python script just make me move over. Did few changes to it to suite my needs, wrapped a shells script around, and I am all converted (took 3 days thou).

Love it !!!!

By: Vahid Pazirandeh

Vahid Pazirandeh — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:22:27 +0000

Nice script (haven’t used it, but python is always sexy :)

Consider also using Google’s migration tool called Email Uploader: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/email_uploader.html

And more migration help from google: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=61369