Insomnia

So, after a few weeks of experimentation, I finally am happy with my Gmail setup and I was ready to completely migrate my Outlook content to Gmail. I moved my address book, and I downloaded the Google calendar sync tool.

I still need to keep my Outlook around until I find a way to sync my WM6 smartphone with the Google calendar/Address book.

Everything worked fine. However, in the middle of the day, my entire Google calendar was obliterated. Every single item gone. After investigation, I was able to tell that the Google calendar sync tool was getting errors trying to access the calendar in Outlook (through MAPI) and interpreted this as me having removed my items from the calendar.

I was able to retrieve my calendar from my smartphone. Everything was not lost. But the Google calendar sync was promptly uninstalled. I guess I am waiting for their next version.

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20 hours locked out from my email was enough. I am happy to be back.

I guess I will have to be really careful in the future. I just don't know careful about what. I wish Google would tell me.

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I got the robosupport message from Google telling me that my problem is important to them yadda, yadda, yadda...

I am still locked-out after 18 hours so I guess that I am in for the full 24hour waiting period. I went to my ISP and changed the password on my POP account so GMail will stop downloading and removing my emails from there.

I still haven't lost hope but I really wish they would tell me the specific cause for the lock down. So I could avoid doing what I did that warranted the lockout.

Labels: gmail, tech

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Well, my Gmail experiment is not going too well. After using GMail as my main mail access for only 4 hours, I got locked-out of my account again. The first time, I was trying to import thousands of emails from my Outlook PST. I got locked-out for 15 minutes. This time, I was just moving a few emails around from folder to folder. And it has been 5 hours now.

I don't think that the guys at Google that implemented IMAP support talked to the guys that implemented the abuse protection policy.

GMail is under the impression that I am trying to do something wrong. I have no leverage on them. I just have to wait and hope that my account is not locked for the maximum 24 hours.

If this keeps on happening, I am going to have to revert back to my old setup.

Labels: gmail, tech

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Ok, so I finally did it. I migrated my email to GMail. (Thanks to Mathieu for his words of wisdom)

Before GMail, I had the following setup:

• Computer at work running Outlook (always on, has spambayes on it and all my rules for dealing with mailing lists and whatnot)
• Windows Mobile 6 device that I use for voice and data
• Computer at home without an email client. I used the web access of our ISP to access email.
  

To be able to access my Inbox from all 3 locations, I setup my Outlook at work to leave mails on the server for 7 days. This meant that I could get access to current mails from anywhere. However, none of my spam filters or email rules applied to the emails on the server. I ended-up sorting and generally dealing with the same emails multiple times. Not to mention the fact that the spam remained on the POP server for me to download with my mobile device.

So my plan was to move everything to Gmail and use the IMAP functionality to keep everything in sync. The process was relatively painless but there are a few things to watch for. So, if you are interested, here's how it went for me:

1. Changed my Outlook settings to remove the emails from the POP server. I didn't want to deal with those emails that I had already dealt with.
2. Once the POP server is clear, I deleted the POP account from Outlook. Essentially stopped the delivery of messages to my inbox.
   
3. I created the IMap account for Google. This created a new "store" in Outlook with [GMail], Inbox, Junk E-Mail and Sent Items folder. (Howto)
4. I move emails from my old inbox into the new inbox (drag and drop). Once that was done, I went to gmail to validate that the emails had been transfered properly.
   
5. I then setup GMail to read new email from my POP server (Settings/Accounts) tab
6. I also setup GMail to use my business address as my default "send mail as" address.
7. I sent myself some test email and voila.
   

I was functional again. With my inbox synchronized on the gmail server. I setup my windows mobile device to access gmail.

To complete my setup, I had to do the following steps:

1. Change my spambayes settings to read incoming emails from the new inbox and deliver suspected spam in the gmail spam folder (under [Gmail]/Spam)
2. Use the gmail web interface to recreate my mailing list rules.
3. Transfer my >1.5 Gigs of email in my PST files to the gmail server (drag and drop)

So now, I am fully functional, I have search capabilities through the gmail interface and I have a synchronized mailbox. There are a few things to watch for is you decide to follow these steps and migrate:

1. When outlook deletes an email through the IMAP interface, it doesn't go in the [Gmail]/Trash folder. It just gets unlabeled and lands in the [Gmail]/All Mail folder. For now, I am not that worried, I still have 2.5G of free space on gmail.
   Note: If you use Thunderbird, you can set it up to use the [Gmail]/Trash folder as its trash folder and it works perfectly.
   
2. If you have gigabytes of legacy emails to transfer, it is possible that google will suspend your account momentarily. They have a feature that detects this as a suspicious activity. My account was suspended for approximately 10 minutes when I tried to transfer my Sent Items folder with >9000 emails in it. When it came back, I resumed the transfer in batches of 1000 emails.
3. Oh and outlook is completely unresponsive when you transfer emails so, do this when you don't need access to your email (like at night)
4. You lose some of the Outlook functionality (like search folders). However, you gain the awesome search power of Google through the GMail interface.
   Plus, the "label" system in GMail lets you achieve a similar kind of functionality. Essentially, the same email can be in two folders at once. Because folders are labels. GMail provides the "starred" label to track items that you flag in outlook. They will reside in both their "container" folder (like the Inbox) and the starred folder. This is a lot like a search folder.
5. If you setup your outlook account to send emails through the GMail SMTP server, your will notice that GMail adds a copy of sent emails automatically in the [Gmail]/Sent Mail folder. Outlook will also make a copy in the Sent Items folder of your personal folder PST. You can disable that in Outlook if you don't want 2 copies.
   

Labels: gmail, tech, work

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