Google adds Mac bulk email uploader for Apps

If you or your company is making the switch to Google Apps and you are on the Mac, you now have a quick way to upload your email to Google's servers.

Google today released its Google Mail uploader for Mac. You can now push your old Apple Mail, Eudora, and Thunderbird up to your Google Apps email account really easily (No Entourage yet!) through this dedicated utility.

This is good not only for people switching to Google Apps, but also people who have long ago switched, yet still have old archived email accounts that they'd like to import.

For instance, I have emails backed up that stretch back to the 90's, some in Eudora's mbox format, others in Mail.app databases.  I rarely have use for any of them, but I am currently uploading them to my free standard Google Apps account so that I can search and reference them when/if needed. 

Note that this service doesn't work with regular Gmail (yet?).

The email uploader is built on our open source Google Data APIs Objective-C Client Library and the Email Migration API. There is also a Google Email Uploader for Windows, as well as online tools for migrating web-based email to Google email accounts. Unfortunately, the Mac and Windows email uploaders currently can upload only to Google Apps email accounts, not to gmail.com or googlemail.com accounts.

Using the uploader

The uploader will try to find your mail archives in their usual locations on Mac OS X:

• Apple Mail: ~/Library/Mail
• Eudora: ~/Eudora Folder
• Thunderbird: ~/Library/Thunderbird

You can add mail search locations with the File menu.

Some tips:

1. Start small. Due to server upload rate limits, the uploader is fast for up to 500 messages, and slow thereafter (1 message per second.) Pick a small subset of your mailboxes when first trying out the uploader.
2. Be patient. Even after uploading completes, the server requires a while to process uploads.
3. Do assign a custom label (this is checked by default.) This lets you effectively "undo" the uploads later by deleting all messages with the label. Deleting the label itself will not delete the mail.
4. If you have many mailboxes in your archives, creating labels for each mailbox probably is not a good idea, as this could create far too many labels.