Good googly moogly is it hard to keep the digitals organized. The other day I got mightily cheesed off trying to check my home email at work, because I left Outlook open at home rendering my webmail useless because I delete messages off the server. So I decided that it was time to get the hell out of client email and move entirely to the web. But Oh Agony! Which free service to use?
And so the Google v. Yahoo debate began. GMail looks like ass, but Yahoo!Mail isn’t as rich an interaction. Until their beta goes out to the world, then they may be better. But Yahoo!Mail stamps a little Yahoo! advertisement at the bottom of every sent mail. But Yahoo! has the fully integrated PIM. But Google just released their calendars, which are superfly. And I don’t use the notes or tasks anyway. But dammit! Neither of them imports email. But wait, I found a third party mail uploader for GMail. And it’s Gmail by a nose!
Here are the oh so tedious steps involved:
- Install Thunderbird
- Import my mail from Outlook
- Install Mark Lyon’s GMail Loader
- Spend two evenings uploading all my old mail
- Drink 1st half of six-pack
- Download a copy of my entire website
- Upgrade the control panel at my hosted site, which blows away all files and configuration. This was required to get a forwarder that wouldn’t also store my email on the server
- Upload my entire website and reconfigure
- Tequila shooter
- Set up forwarders at my 7 other email addresses to point to GMail
- Export my Outlook contacts
- Import contacts into GMail
- Spend two evenings cleaning up the horrible imported contacts
- Drink second half of six-pack
It makes me wonder if people who don’t deal with technology daily run into these kinds of problems. Because if they do, you gotta believe they are totally screwed.