Forum Discussion
Gmail Migration
Most people discussing the migration of Telus email to Google Mail are coming with questions and/or complaints. This is unnerving as I contemplate initiating the migration. It would be helpful to k...
Thanks Ron. That's reassuring. The time may have finally come when I must abandon Eudora and switch to Thunderbird. I tried testing Eudora to get it to download messages from my Gmail account, which is theoretically possible, but I couldn't get it to work despite setting up Less Secure Apps etc. Which does not bode well for using Google Mail after the migration. Besides which Google is promising to stop allowing "less secure apps" altogether in 2021.
Essjay1; "The time may have finally come when I must abandon Eudora and switch to Thunderbird."
It looks like that is possible but not exactly straightforward. From what I see, you have to install an old version of Thunderbird (17.0.9) that has the capability to import Eudora to do it. I presume after you do the import and verify everything is good, then you can upgrade Thunderbird to the current version... See this link:
Importing from Eudora to Thunderbird
I don't know much about Eudora, but I suspect you will like Thunderbird. I find it so much better than Outlook or Outlook Express which I converted from. The only issue I had with the Telus conversion was with integrating the Google Calendar into Lightning which is the calendar add on to Thunderbird. The add on to do it did not work with the Telus created Google Account. However, I found another add on that inserts an Open Google Calendar tab right into Thunderbrid. I was also able to import all my past and future calendar appointments from Lightning to Google Calendar.
Hope that helps some. If you are going to convert to Thunderbird my suggestion would be to do it and get things all sorted out before you let Telus Google you.
I did install an earlier version of Tbird that would let me import my Eudora data, then upgraded to the current version. That seemed successful. I don’t use an online calendar, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
I have some questions in to the Tbird community forum. As you say, Ron, it is best to have everything lined up before turning Telus and Google loose.
Thanks for your cogent advice. I appreciate hearing from someone for whom the migration ran without hitches. (If pressing the Go button happens to lead to problems, you may hear from me again. 😉 )
Oh, and to be clear, if you only intend to send email from Thunderbird you do not have to do any of this. Your existing Thunderbird Address Book, can be used to start them. You can also respond to emails that are still in the POP3 account.
Another thing to think about is Contacts. I had thousands of contacts in my Thunderbird which were imported from Outlook, which mirrored my work Outlook. I'm long retired but never got around to cleaning up my Contacts. I did that also before migrating to Gmail. It was not really critical as I never had contacts in my Telus Webmail. They were all in the Thunderbird address book. In my iPhone I manually entered a very short list of contacts with mainly phone numbers, as I did not do email on my phone. I also installed an iPhone app for Ooma which has some neat features. It allows you to make cell phone calls for free whenever you have WiFi. It also lets me hear messages left on my home Ooma phone. It also has a contact list in addition to the iPhone contact list. All on its own it seem to sync with the iPhone list. All was kind of good.
Then I got Googled by Telus and started doing email on my iPhone using the Gmail app. I then discovered I had no contacts to use to send new emails. I could just respond to ones I received, or had to manually enter each email address. I kind of let sleeping dogs lie for a while, but today I decided to try and get the Google Contacts working. My first attempt which was easy was to export the Thunderbird Address book to a CSV file, and then import it into Google Contacts. That worked fine. Then I learned I could set my iPhone to sync my iPhone contact list with a Google Contacts, just using Settings, Accounts, etc... That worked pretty good as well. I knew there was another option to use a Thunderbird add on, gContactSync, to keep Thunderbird in sync with Google Contacts. After that step I got kind of a mess. Some contacts got duplicated, and some did not seem to sync. That is where I am at now, and don't really have it sorted out yet. It has gotten kind of complicated, and I don't know what is syncing with what. I think I will let the new sleeping dog lie for a while and see if I can figure out what is going on...
Sorry I don't have a perfect solution for you, but if you to have contacts imported from Eudora in Thunderbird it is something you should think about.
