technology

So last night I uploaded into Gmail all the old emails I had in Outlook.

It was a very easy task, as simple as dragging them from 'Personal Folders' to the IMAP 'Gmail/All Mail' folder, then doing the same from Sent Items to 'Gmail/Sent Mail'. It took a while, but now all my emails are available online, and I can access them from any machine, including my iPhone.

Why have I done this? Because I like keeping similar things in one place, and because with Gmail's fast and advanced search it is much easier to find what I am looking for.

Email duplication

By doing this, a portion of my messages (those received since I started using Gmail and before I stopped using Outlook a few months ago) have now been duplicated in Gmail. Upon investigation they appear to differ only by some elements of text formatting (extra line breaks), which is probably why software such as Duplicate Email Remover for Outlook failed to identify them.

After a bit of fiddling around, I chose to live with it – Gmail groups duplicates in one conversation anyway.

What if Google goes bust?

If Google loses your email, closes/locks your account, or the service is simply down, you will have no way to retrieve your messages. If that scares you, you might want to keep your Gmail account in sync with Zoho (painlessly via POP mail).

Alternatively, you could see the loss of all your emails as a welcome opportunity to start afresh with a clean slate, like a very wise former colleague of mine said when we were discussing pros and cons of keeping all your data 'in the cloud'.