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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,
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.
