I keep all my email, always have. It’s amazing when some seemingly random and unimportant email becomes anything but seven months later. I don’t proclaim to be special but over the decade I have accumulated tens of thousands of email. Searching for that one address or phone number of a long lost contact took awhile in Mozilla Thunderbird, a long long while. Gmail accomplishes this same feat in 2.3 pico-seconds. I timed it – I wouldn’t lie to you.

I dumped Thunderbird as my primary email client, after a long affair with the younger and sexier Gmail. It wasn’t easy – I fear change, a creature of habit if you will. Yet I found the notion of a centrally accessible mailbox intriguing and worth a chance.

After setting mail-forwards for all my addresses to Gmail, I forced myself to use it for a few weeks. Old habits die hard. What I discovered with Gmail was nothing short of amazing. Being sincere, here was a Webmail that was actually on par with a traditional desktop email client. We’ve been spoiled by Google’s slick and simple interfaces, and Gmail was no different. Gmail is fast, african swallow fast.

It wasn’t long before I came across a nice little app that will import all your messages into Gmail from Thunderbird (as well as a few other clients). It worked well enough, albeit slower than I’d hope. My slight gripe is actually a fault of Google rather than this application, I think atleast. The Gmail interface will show the Received Date from Gmail, rather than the date the email was actually composed and sent. Consequently, Gmail shows all my imported messages for the same date, the day of import. I blame Gmail as when the mail is POP’d (a nice feature I did not touch on) back from Google, Thunderbird displays the correct date. I found this as a pretty big gotcha at first, but obviously I have overcome it. Still, maybe it will be addressed some day? Better yet, Gmail should allow us to upload our old email; eliminating the need for an external program.

Gmail has numerous other features that I am not going to get into at this time. My purpose here was to dispel any preconceived notions and invite change into your life. With some luck, you may end up like me, left wondering how you ever managed without.