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...
Oldislander I have the gmail (gsuite) working but not to my liking. looking to move on to another email platform lots involved. lost my saved mails. Polecat
I think the message in this is that it is much safer to make the Telus forced conversion to Gmail if you are using an email system that keeps all the email on your hard drive and it is backed up. That is basically the system I had with Thunderbird. The day before the conversion I went into Outlook at let it download my email from Telus as it does each time you open it up, and I thought there would be nothing for Telus to convert over to Gmail (or lose!). Well I had forgotten that when I very infrequently use Telus Webmail and respond to an email using it, the Webmail was saving my response as Sent Mail. My Thunderbird was not set up to download the Sent mail. However, when I went into Gmail for the first time, I was surprised that these quite old Sent Mail emails were there. I was not as ready and protected as I thought I was, but all went well anyway.
The bottom line is that I think one is best to take all the email from Telus by using an email application that saves everything on the local hard drive like Thunderbird BEFORE you let Telus make the Gmail conversion. And as an extra precaution one should back up the local saved email file before they make the conversion.
I absolutely agree. Everything (messages, contacts, etc.) should be backed up before letting Telus or Google touch anything. That way even if they mess up so much that you lose your messages you have data you can probably work with whether in a new email application or even, if really necessary, in a data file that can be read in a text reader.
Although, if people have only ever used email inside a browser (like webmail or Gmail) I'm not sure how one would back up the data. Also, I am totally a Windows person, so I have no idea how to deal with the problem in an Apple environment.
essjay1 that is good information. I never really thought about those that use a cloud browser based email system only. I suppose some do not even have a PC or Mac, and try to handle everything with a smartphone. I suppose that is possible but I sure could not do it.
If someone is on a browser cloud based storage email that is compatible with Thunderbird all you have to do is an IMAP installation of Thunderbird and you have both a computer based email system with your own files on your hard drive, as well as a cloud based browser system you can access anywhere. When you install Thunderbird and link it to a browser based cloud email system, the first thing it does is download all your email and save it on your hard drive. After that it mirrors what is changed on either the browser based system (like Gmail) or on Thunderbird. The mirroring is virtually instant.
- I have no idea what Thunderbird or some of the other things that people are talking about....I am not a technician.
Oldislander Speaking from a PC and Windows perspective, Thunderbird and Outlook and Windows Mail are applications (called "email clients") that allow you to download email from Telus or Google's servers to your own computer's hard drive to view, read, reply, organize, and store. You download directly and view in your application rather than viewing through a web browser. They are called 3rd party apps because they are built and updated by Mozilla and Microsoft, not by Telus or Google. (Telus and Google are the first parties, you are the second party (I think), Mozilla and Microsoft are the 3rd parties.)
Here is Thunderbird's website, but it does assume you understand how an email client works, as distinct from webmail. https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/
Here is a page that is a reasonably general explanation of the difference. Most of the explanations I found were quite technical. https://difference.guru/difference-between-an-email-client-and-webmail/ (The video is not great.)
- If I download Outlook, can I transfer my saved Telus mailboxes to it?
Oops, I had a bit of a brain fart there. I have not used Outlook for many years, although I still have my old PST files. I meant to say "The day before the conversion I went into Thunderbird..."
