January 2009 Archives

I've taken the plunge and moved to gmail for all my email. I've exported all my email, contacts, and calendar, and notes and then imported them into gmail.

For all my non university email addresses, I've set up forwarding so it goes straight to my gmail account. The IT wonks at the university are in the process of setting up the forwarding of their email to my gmail account. In the meantime I have a rule that moves my university email to gmail via imap folders. Once the proper redirection is in place, it will be interesting to see if my university email still gets processed by the University's spam filters (they just tag email as spam, allowing the recipient to decide what to do with it).

One little thing I have yet to solve has to do with filters. Gmail allows one to apply filters to messages (to label them, move them, delete them, etc). However, one can only match ordinary text (i.e. not the email message headers per se). Also, the "*" is a wild card. But the university tags spam with "***SPAM***".

Now ideally, I would like to filter messages that have "***SPAM***" in subject line. Alas, I can't (because of the wild cards). If I just match on "spam", then I also select messages where I'm writing about spam; e.g., "How much spam do you get". Maybe in the future gmail will allow one to match on email header information such as "X-Spam: yes".

But really, that is a minor thing. So far I am really impressed with gmail, and as I learn the shortcut keys I am even more impressed.

Previously, I kept all my email in a series of folders (e.g. 2001, 2002, 2003, ...). But with gmail I've found the search so fast an powerful that I've done away with those somewhat arbitrary categories.

Having downloaded my emails from gmail (so I can have a backup), how do I read them (in case gmail goes down).

We'll I've elected to use mutt, which is a nice piece of software based on the "Worse is better" principle. As the author of mutt says:

"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." -me, circa 1995

Most of the conifguration for mutt can be done through the .muttrc file. Mine is like this:

set mbox_type=Maildir
set folder="~/Gmail-archive"
set spoolfile="~/Gmail-archive"
set mbox="~/Gmail-archive"
set mask="!^\\.[^.]"
set record="+.Sent"
set postponed="+.Drafts"

set reply_regexp="^(((\*\*\*SPAM\*\*\*[ \t])|[rR][eE]:[ \t])*)+"

set pager_index_lines=9
color index brightgreen  default    ~p    # To me (personal)
color index yellow       default    ~N    # New
color index yellow       default    ~O    # Old
bind  pager   <up>     previous-line
bind  pager   <down>   next-line
bind  pager   <left>   exit
bind  pager   <right>  view-attachments
bind  attach  <left>   exit
bind  attach  <right>  view-attach
bind  index   <right>  display-message
macro index   <left>   "c?"
bind  browser <right>  select-entry
bind  browser <left>   exit

The little regex bit remove the ***SPAM*** heading from messages (that is attached by our mail system to suspect Spam) if I decide to reply to it. I.e., if a mail item is incorrectly classified I don't want the send to be bothered by the fact it was labeled as Spam.

I tend to keep all my email. In fact, I've been doing that since 1999.

The University of Auckland Business School uses Exchange and puts quotas on the amount of mail that each individual can store. Although, over the years, the size of the quota has increased, it isn't enough to allow me to keep all my email. So, I've been using a PST file to keep all my old mail (i.e., mail that isn't current for this year). That PST file is now over 3Gb (which I suppose isn't much in the scheme of things), but it is a constant source of worry to our IT folks.

I"ve often wondered how else I might store the messages, and I think I might put them all up on gmail. Although gmail is reliable, it isn't 100%, so if I do use it as my mail archive, I also want a separate backup.

Having looked around, I think I might use getmail to copy my email from gmail into a maildir

Roughly, I followed the instructions from George Donnelly

I tweaked a couple of things. My rcfile (getmail.gmail) looks like this:

[retriever]
type = SimplePOP3SSLRetriever
server = pop.gmail.com
username = myname@gmail.com
password = mypassword

[destination]
type = Maildir
path = ~/Gmail-archive/

[options]
# print messages about each action (verbose = 2)
# Other options:
# 0 prints only warnings and errors
# 1 prints messages about retrieving and deleting messages only
#verbose = 2
verbose = 2
received = false
delivered_to = false
message_log = ~/.getmail/gmail.log

Now all I need to do, is decide if I really want to upload my whole email archive to google ...