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Has anyone had a successful, pain free migration to Google Mail?
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...
If we restrict the scope to mail only, then yes, I had a seamless pain free migration from Telus mail to Gmail. I was using Thunderbird and POP3. Incoming mail was downloaded from the Telus server each time I logged in. I very rarely used the Telus Webmail, only when traveling. And if we put aside the risk of having your mail stored on a Google floating barge in a third world country, I am more happy with the Gmail system than the Telus system. I can now access my mail on my phone. I still use Thunderbird and am quite happy with that arrangement. I now use IMAP instead of POP3. That means the mail stays on the Google server (so I can access it from my phone or anywhere I have internet), but Thunderbird mirrors it and downloads a copy of the mail to my home PC where it is saved on my hard drive. Changes made in Thunderbird are immediately also made on the Google server, and vice versa. The only issue I am having is that I occasionally have to resign into Google and enter my password. Not sure what is causing that...
The Calendar is another matter. I was using Thunderbird Lightning. There is an add on for Thunderbird that is supposed to sync a Google Calendar to the Lightning calendar. That did not work and it seemed to be caused by the flavour of the gmail account that Telus created. The add on worked for direct gmail accounts, but not the Telus created account. I finally found a work around with another add on, that simply displays the Google Calendar as a tab in Thunderbird, and does not use Lightning. That seems to work fine.
I don't know what you are using for an e-mail on your computer, but one piece of advice I would give you is to go into the Telus Webmail and download all the mail on their server. If you have an email system that saves your email on your hard drive, then you will have all your old email regardless of what Telus does.
Hope that helps some,
If we restrict the scope to mail only, then yes, I had a seamless pain free migration from Telus mail to Gmail. I was using Thunderbird and POP3. Incoming mail was downloaded from the Telus server each time I logged in. I very rarely used the Telus Webmail, only when traveling. And if we put aside the risk of having your mail stored on a Google floating barge in a third world country, I am more happy with the Gmail system than the Telus system. I can now access my mail on my phone. I still use Thunderbird and am quite happy with that arrangement. I now use IMAP instead of POP3. That means the mail stays on the Google server (so I can access it from my phone or anywhere I have internet), but Thunderbird mirrors it and downloads a copy of the mail to my home PC where it is saved on my hard drive. Changes made in Thunderbird are immediately also made on the Google server, and vice versa. The only issue I am having is that I occasionally have to resign into Google and enter my password. Not sure what is causing that...
The Calendar is another matter. I was using Thunderbird Lightning. There is an add on for Thunderbird that is supposed to sync a Google Calendar to the Lightning calendar. That did not work and it seemed to be caused by the flavour of the gmail account that Telus created. The add on worked for direct gmail accounts, but not the Telus created account. I finally found a work around with another add on, that simply displays the Google Calendar as a tab in Thunderbird, and does not use Lightning. That seems to work fine.
I don't know what you are using for an e-mail on your computer, but one piece of advice I would give you is to go into the Telus Webmail and download all the mail on their server. If you have an email system that saves your email on your hard drive, then you will have all your old email regardless of what Telus does.
Hope that helps some,
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. 😉 )
