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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,
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.
