Google Apps Gotchas

So I’ve barely slept since I started this whole thing. It turns out that moving mail over from numerous mail accounts takes a lot of time and active input, but I’ve made a lot of progress and other than deleting a few of the now unnecessary email accounts, I think I’m done!

Here’s a few tips for anyone moving to a Google apps accounts, especially if they’re migrating from a complicated setup like mine.

1) You can copy your mail from an existing gmail account to a google apps account using the pop accounts. Click settings, then accounts. Note that if you have more than a few emails, this will take a long time and will stop and start a lot, but it does happen all by itself. You need to make sure that your pop settings on your old gmail account are as you want them, do you want all your mail or just the newer stuff?

2) You don’t need to purchase or download any extra software to move mail from an imap enabled account to your new Google apps account. Using your existing mail client, simply add both accounts at the same time, mapping all the folders. Then just drag and drop the mail between accounts as you please. This requires a lot of input as you’ll inevitably have timeouts and other irregularities that require you’re attention.

3) If your like me and have previously forwarded and archived mail from a gmail account to another pop account, then you will have lots of duplicate mail by the time your done. I’m yet to figure out a way to fix this without giving some shady software or site access to my Google apps account, so I might leave this – at least for now. Better two copies of an email than none.

4) If you used different emails for different domains, then you need to add a domain alias and then a nickname. The problem with this is that every time you add a nickname, you’re adding that email to every domain. Example, if you have domain1.com and domain2.com, and bob has an alias bobby, then the emails [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] all go to the same inbox. For me this isn’t a big deal but it might trip some people up.

Aside from that though, the move was rather painless and I’m glad I did it. Google is about one month worth of mail off from completing the move from my gmail account and all my other mail is already there.

I’m looking forward to tweaking my new setup and getting everything the way I want it. I used to be an avid mutt user and before that it was pine so the keyboard shortcuts feel so right to me. The gmail interface really has come a long was since I last used it full time, over three years ago!

I don’t think I’ll miss Apple Mail. As nice as it’s integration with the desktop is, I am actually looking forward to not being so reliant on it.