After 6 years on yahoo – I have decided to move on. I think the clean simplicity (with its text based ads) are much better than jumping animations and the like. Not to mention Yahoo’s sucky search. And its unbearable slowness of being. Did I mention free POP, and smtp access?
But the best part happened after I moved to gmail. All my email threads, which were different/disjoint mails on yahoo, became cohesively grouped as “conversations” on gmail.
How did I do it?
You cant simply forward all your mails from yahoo to google – they wont come marked with that nice “from” and “to” addresses. Fortunately the answer is SMTP relay.
This is done in 3 simple steps:
1. Install thunderbird, yahoopops and download gexodus (this one a great creation by Singaporean Cheah Chu Yeow)
2. run yahoopops – give ur yahoo user name and password as well as folders (on your yahoo account) to download mail from. Run thunderbird and give POP3 server as “127.0.0.1″ (this is where ur yahoopops will be running)
note: for hotmail accounts, just change yahoopops to hotmailpopper or some like that
3. after all your mail is downloaded (by default all your folders on yahoo will be downloaded to the same inbox in thunderbird. if u dont want this, download each folder in the inbox one-by-one and move it to a different folder. I did it this way)
4. run gexodus – it asks for the following things
- gmail email address (no password required)
- SMTP server – a default one is provided, but I strongly suggest u use the ones from this list
- mailbox file – the important one . if you type “%appdata%” on ur windows command prompt, u will go to a folder which contains the Thunderbord folder. Navigate till u see files like “inbox”, ” inbox.msf”, “personal”, “personal.msf” . These correspond to ur thunderbird folders. Choose the file (without the msf) that corresponds to the folder u want to upload
- tag – very nifty feature. appends a string (for e.g. I used “yahoo-inbox” ) in the subject line of every email u upload. Useful to sort ur mails later.
Press “import”
Voila.
On a closing note – let me share what I think about Yahoo’s new Outlook-like interface
“Honey I got a boob job”
“Darling, that was not what was wrong in the first place”
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7 Comments
Thats a great piece of information!
Thanks!!
Thanks for sharing these tips. It can save others a lot of time.
Yahoo’s outlook-like interface looks nice, but it sure runs slow on my PCs. And, it doesn’t run on the Opera browser. How dare they!
wise move dude..I have been using gmail for over 2 yrs and it became my primary email id…its simple , fast and very neat iterface…
boob job….lol !!!! I died rolling over the floor
Thanks for the post. gExodus worked perfectly the first time. But now I am trying to run it again, for the new mail that has since collected in my other email account, and gExodus is importing all the old mail from before–even though I deleted every message from Thunderbird and my other email account. Anyone else run into this problem, or have any idea how/why this is happening, and what I can do to run gExodus for the new messages only?
Thank you!!
“Compact your folder” – In thunderbird you need to compact a folder (by right clicking on it) after deleting messages, etc. It is kind of like “Recycle Bin” in windows.
thank gawd for you
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[...] going to go into detail about how to do this there are many sites that explain the process such as this one. The two programs I used were YPops 0.8.6.2 and gexodus 0.2. To find a version of YPops [...]