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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,
Sorry. The previous post got away from me. As I was saying:
The settings that Thunderbird filled in for me during the test are:
Protocol: POP3
Server: pop.telus.net (This is for incoming mail.)
Port: 995
SSL: SSL/TLS
Authentication: Kerberos/GSSAPI
Username:
To complete setting up the account, even though you won't actually be using it, you will need to include the settings for sending mail. They are:
Protocol: SMTP
Server: smtp.telus.net
Port: 465
SSL: SSL/TLS
Authentication: Normal password
Username.
If you press the Test or Re-test button, Tbird should tell you that the configuration is recognized by the server. Now, whether or not a Checking Mail will work is another question. Especially since you want it to capture mailbox folder names as well as messages.
The settings should work for Outlook or Windows Mail if you already have them. The whole experiment is just that, but if it works it will give you copies of your messages that you can refer to even if Telus never gets your migration to Google sorted.
Good luck. Let us know what happens.
Thanks for the detailed information. I am thinking of trying Thunderbird for use on my iMac as I am not a fan of Gmail; even with mailboxes, it would not by my second choice after Telus.
