Gmail is great!

By Thomas Steiner. Written on Sun Feb 12 2006. Technical

Archiving my email with Gmail and labels

Today I archived my old email. My first (still stored) email dates back to 1998. I have stored my correspondence in the mbox format, first using Netscape, then Mozilla and today Thunderbird. With Gmail's great search technique and the more than 2 gigabyte of memory I thought it was just great to really have all mails accessible online.

Question is: how to get the email in Gmail? Therefore I discovered Mark Lyon's simple, multi-platform Gmail Loader whose only purpose is to

read an mbox file
forward all the emails contained to a Gmail account

Forwarding the email comes along with the inconvenience of all the original sent dates being lost (the dates are kept inside the mail text). Being given the opportunities I have, this is a compromise I can live with.

A feature I considered kind of useless are Gmail labels. Till this day. With labels you can tag semantic information to each mail. Now I just love labels like 'Friends', 'Work', 'Family', … They help me organize my mail and simply make my life easier.

Image from mail.google.com