Transitioning to Gmail

I’ve been on Gmail for a few years and really like it.  However my 10 year old Yahoo Mail has about 15,000 messages on it.  While Yahoo does offer “unlimited” storage I’m tired of waiting for an improved search and lack of threading.  What prevented me from completing switching over was how to migrate my old messages over to Gmail.

In a strategic move by Yahoo, they removed POP access to their mailboxes so you’re essentially forced to keep your mail on Yahoo’s mail servers unless you upgrade to their paid service which provides you POP access.  My hope was to somehow retrieve all those messages and import them to my gmail.  I’ve never been able to figure out how to do that until I stumbled across this clever little python script called Ypops.

You can use Ypops to allow your local machine to act like a POP proxy to your Yahoo mailbox and configure a local email client like Outlook or Thunderbird.  Rather than doing that I had my local machine act as a gateway and pointed my new gmail account to my local machine and POP into it and retrieve all of my messages.  As long as my local machine was up and running Gmail continued to POP into my machine to retrieve my Yahoo messages.

There’s other alternatives out there such as GMail Mail Loader however Ypops does a good job of preserving the headers of the mail instead of simply forwarding the mail like what Gmail Mail Loader does.  Thought I’d share.