I have recently bought a Nokia S60 smart phone, and have migrated my email to Google Apps. I am now using the Gmail interface to access my emails when I am on my desktop, but I am wondering how I can send/receive emails on my mobile phone.

Solution(s)

Well. It is complicated and so far I have no found a perfect solution in my case. There are a few good alternatives, but none works perfectly for me.

Gmail for Mobile

The most natural solution would be Gmail for Mobile from Google. It is a J2ME based application (so it is not native on Nokia S60), however it has probably the best Google integration currently.

What I like about it:

• It works well — just like Gmail inside the browser. Sent and received emails are linked together (just like on Gmail). You get your full contact list just like how it works on Gmail. There are lots of very convenient short-cut keys — just like Gmail!
• It supports multiple Google accounts. Not a big deal for me but I think it would be for those having a dozen Gmail accounts that need constant monitoring.
• Good off-line support. You can still read/compose email when you don’t have data connection.

What I don’t like about it:

• Slow. J2ME-kinda-slow. With Google’s focus now on Android, I doubt a native Symbian/S60 executable will be released.
• Buggy. Crashed on me a few times. There are also some bugs that prevent me from sending/replying emails. Currently I have two domains associated with my Google Apps account, and in Gmail I sent up to receive from both. However I cannot reply emails if it’s sent to my additional domain — it will say something about the connection problem.

Currently I have Gmail for Mobile bound to my “Message Key” on my Nokia E71.

Nokia Messaging

Nokia Messaging is a push-email-like service provided by Nokia, and currently they are offering free trial and it allows you to manage up to 10 email addresses/accounts.

What I like about Nokia Messaging:

• Pretty responsive due to being a native executable. Good message listing view. Very concise message view.
• Very flexible sync options to provide you a push-email like experience.
• Good integration with the rest of the system. For example home screen notifications. Contacts. Etc.

What I don’t like about Nokia Messaging:

• Sync chews battery. A lot. It also chews through your data usage, which can be costly.
• Not Gmail-enough. While it claims full Gmail support, I don’t get conversation view between sender and receivers. Label obviously does not work.
• Delete emails from Nokia Messaging actually does not delete that email from Gmail, but move to “All Mails” instead. It should have used IMAP command to move it to the Trash for deletion. So I ended up have to go back to the desktop version to delete all the unwanted emails.

Another issue — who knows how much Nokia is going to charge this?

Others

There are of course other free solutions. Default Nokia email client? Use mobile browser version of Gmail? I don’t think either have provided me the functionality of either Nokia Messaging or Gmail for Mobile.

Any other suggestion?

The challenge for me though, is to move all my past emails from my email server (running Postfix + Dovecot) to Gmail. Although I am usually a “deleter” (rather than an archiver), I still kept some of my emails all the way from 1997. Over the years I have over 10,000+ emails sitting in Maildir format on my server, that somehow I need to move them to Gmail.

So I tried to connect to my Gmail account using Thunderbird + IMAP, and then manually drag all the emails over. That was a disaster. For example if I highlighted 100 emails, then drag ‘n’ drop them into “All Mails” under Gmail, and then the operation failed half way through (happens all the time) — I might end up having 50 random emails inside Gmail, but those were not deleted from my old account. That means I have to manually figure out which exact emails have been copied over — and that’s quite a tedious process. To make it safer, you just drag smaller batches over (say 10 at a time). Not a good idea if you have 10,000+ emails waiting to be moved.

Being a lazy programmer I thought the easiest way would be writing a small program that automates this. It would do one email at a time. If the operation failed, it will also know where to resume. The end result? A small Python script that’s conveniently named as maildir2gmail.py.

Download

• Download: maildir2gmail.py (4.6k)

Usage

This script basically works through all files in a directory, working out which ones are RFC822 email messages, and then push those files up to Gmail via an IMAP connection. It also remembers the file names that it had worked through so if the program somehow died (due to a bug for example), just restart it again. Well, this script is provided “as is” with no warranty. It works for me that migrated all my 10,000+ of old emails to Gmail, but YMMV.

To run it:

Usage: maildir2gmail.py [options] [maildirs]

Upload email messages from a list of Maildir to Google Mail.

Options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -f FOLDER, --folder=FOLDER
                        Folder to store the emails. [default: All Mail]
  -p PASSWORD, --password=PASSWORD
                        Password to log into Gmail
  -u USERNAME, --username=USERNAME
                        Username to log into Gmail

For example moving all my inbox to Gmail’s “All Mails”, and all my sent mails to Gmail’s “Sent Mails”:

$ python maildir2gmail.py -u username@gmail.com -p password ~/.maildir/cur
$ python maildir2gmail.py -u username@gmail.com -p password -f "Sent Mail" ~/.maildir/.Sent/cur

It will then print out which message it is working on. Go to sleep, and hopefully all messages will be migrated when you wake up in the morning :) On my old home server (AMD Duron 1GHz in Sydney), it took around 1-2 seconds per message. On a 64MB VPS I had with RapidXen in Fremont CA, it was doing around 2-3 messages per second.

Hopefully it would be helpful to some.

Yes, it’s Google Mail. Or to be more specific, Gmail part of Google Apps, and it is now hosting my (and Vivian’s) emails on this domain (yang.id.au).

I have been running my own email server for the last 10 years, hosting my own domains. It has been sendmail at the beginning, then qmail, and then postfix for the better part of last 10 years. I have tried various IMAP solutions. The ultra-insecure wu-ftpd first, then Courier-IMAP, and for the last 2 years Dovecot. The server has been running on various Linux distributions — RedHat, Mandrake and Gentoo. And in the recent years I also have to deal with email spams/virus. I have tried various combinations of Spam Assassin, ClamAV, Gld for greylisting and dspam.

Yes. Running a mail server — even for just two people — is a lot of work. Moreover I have not yet mention about hardware related issues that have been plaguing my home server for the last couple of weeks. What a pain!

So I am at the cross-road of choices again. Should I bow down to the Google god and submit all my private emails into the cloud in return of piece of mind that they will be in safe hands? Or should I continue to keep my ageing server running, and train that stupid bayesian filter that still can’t seem to figure out the difference between spam and ham…

Not the first time I had this internal battle. I always picked the former in the past years. However this time, under the “encouraging” words of josephb (yeah, I am just finding someone to blame in case it did not work out :), I picked the cloud. I think I made the right choice (so far).

Signing up and modifying the DNS records are easy. It’s also quite straight forward to set up IMAP4 so Vivian can still use Thunderbird to access her emails. Now I have fully integrated email solution that can be accessed from anywhere…

• Web-based access via Google Mail
• IMAP4-based access via Thunderbird
• Mobile-based access via Gmail J2ME app

So far so good. No more software upgrade, or ringing home from work “hey Vivian can you reboot the server?” Although I am no longer able to grep -r foobar ~/.maildir/ to scan through my mails, I can now search my emails like how I search on Google.

Copying all my existing emails (from the last 12 years) to Google did require a little bit more work. I will write about it in my next post.