Hacking Gmail

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Chapter 1 — Desktop Integration
F
IGURE
1-7: GmailerXP in action
And Now . . . 
By now you should be happily using Gmail, with new mail showing up on your
desktop and 
mailto:
links on the web causing Gmail to open, not the default
mail reader you got with the operating system. In the next chapter, you look at
using the POP interface to pull your Gmail mail down into that very reader.
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Integrating Your
Existing Mail
G
mail is probably not your first e-mail account, but its fea-
tures may well make it your best. Certainly it’s likely to be
the one with the biggest amount of storage available and
such an exemplary search system.
Importing Your Mail into Gmail
The most important thing for me, when starting to use Gmail
properly, was getting all of my existing mail into the Gmail sys-
tem. Alas, Gmail doesn’t have an import facility, so in this chapter
you have to make use of someone else’s hack to get your existing
mail into the system. There are a few applications available to do
this, but none are as good as the one concentrated on in the fol-
lowing section: Gmail Loader.
Gmail Loader
Mark Lyon’s Gmail Loader (shown in Figure 2-1), which you can
find at 
www.marklyon.org/gmail/default.htm
, does the
trick very nicely indeed. It’s available in versions for Windows,
OS X, and Linux, and in a source-code version. To quote the
author, “The GMail Loader is a graphical, cross-platform,
Python-based utility that supports two mBox formats (Netscape,
Mozilla, Thunderbird, Most Other Clients), MailDir (Qmail,
others), MMDF (Mutt), MH (NMH), and Babyl (Emacs
RMAIL). Eventually, I plan to add support for direct sending of
IMAP accounts, and am working on a library that can read and
export Microsoft Outlook PST files.” (This was in December
2004. That addition may well have happened by now.)
˛
Importing your mail
˛
Using Pop3 with
Gmail
˛
Imap for Gmail?
chapter
in this chapter
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