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Transferring Mail from AOL?
Bazooka Joel asks: "My father has been a long time user of AOL. He subscribed to AOL's dialup service about 5 years ago and created his first email account with their services. We now have cable internet from a local company, but he still pays $15 a month just to access his email. I have tried to get him to switch to Gmail, but he is stubborn. He finally relented and said that if I could forward all of his old mail (thousands of messages) and import his contact list into Gmail, he would cancel his AOL subscription. After searching the 'net, I found a way to import his contacts. However, I cannot find a program that will forward all of his old mail. Can anybody lend me a hand?"
Tell your dad to get hip and start IMing, e-mail is SOOOOO out these days.
Are you secure enough in your masculinity to run 'man touch'?
Leave him with his windows client as is, and just get it to check the gmail account from now on. All his existing email will be stored locally, and in a few years when he decides that he really doesn't need them any more, the new stuff will all be synched between his desktop and gmail on the web, if he decides he wants to switch to a webapp for his email.
If you can't find any better solution, I guess hack up a quick screenscraper on the webmail. It's not hard, especially for a one-time-use sort of thing.
A quick google turned this up:
http://aoleave.com/
It looks to be exactly what you are looking for, but it seems to be a little out of date so it may not necessarily work.
Doesn't AOL provide IMAP access to their mailboxes?
If so, you may be able to use a mail client (Thunderbird, maybe?) for proxy between the IMAP link to AOL and the POP link to Gmail.
The only caveat is that Gmail may not upload those messages once you drop them into the inbox on your mail client.
You could use IMAP to grab the mail off of AOL's servers in any IMAP-capable email client, according to their site.
...we had to forward our email one by one!
Netscape allows you to get your AOL mail via IMAP (at least it used to). You could download it that way, and then use one of the various utilities out there to forward your mail to Gmail (Google for them). Some do a simple forward and everything looks like it came from you, and others I think are a bit smarter about it (I think they use redirect instead of forward).
Not to be obvious, but does your Dad really need to keep all that mail? I can understand if he runs a business and needs to keep track of customer correspondance, but if that was the case, I doubt he would have used AOL in the first place.
I really don't see why he needs to keep years worth of email, I doubt he has ever, or would ever, need to pull up a message from a month ago, let alone 2 or more years ago.
I think that your father should just switch to Gmail and bite the bullet and loose all that junk. As far as I can tell, there is nothing he can do anyways to swap email from AOL to Gmail, but he could always go through his AOL list and forward those messages he wants to keep. But I doubt there is any real need to preserve years worth of personal email. AOL is NOT going to make it easy for someone to switch to a new email service, thats why the force people like your Dad to keep paying for it despite being other free services available.
So, tell your stubborn pops that he needs to let go. Setup a Gmail account and have him go through his AOL message and forward those emails he really needs to keep. Chances are after about an hour of this tediousness he will realize that there isn't any reason to hold on to all those emails and just start fresh.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
You can use any POP client to download the email from AOL. That's simple.
But uploading is the problem. Neither Gmail nor Yahoo Mail let you upload messages to their server.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
How much you willing to pay?
Can anybody lend me a hand?
Sure, if you don't mind my RFID tag. [/rimshot]
Trolling is a art,
Or, if that doesn't sound appealing, here's a better idea:
AOL Mail supports IMAP. Gmail supports POP3. Download Mozilla Thunderbird (or some other e-mail client) and set up two accounts for it (the gmail and AOL). The one application will then allow him to receive all his old AOL e-mails and any new e-mail that may be sent to his new gmail account.
Don't cancel the AOL account right away. Have him start by sending all new emails from gmail, even if they are received by AOL. Within two or three months, all his contacts should be sending mail to the new address.
For reference, the AOL Incoming Mail Server (IMAP) is imap.aol.com (port 143). By default, POP3 is not enabled in gmail. To turn it on, click "settings" from the main in-box page and then "forwarding and POP"
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
Can you download the email from AOL, or is it webmail only? I would look at a combination of fetchmail http://www.catb.org/~esr/fetchmail/ to get the mail and gmail loader http://www.marklyon.org/gmail/ to load it to gmail.
Even if the AOL email is webmail only, someone may have a tool to get the email and put it into mbox format. A quick google shows that web2pop http://www.jmasoftware.com/english/ might be helpful.
What ever way you go, it'll probably be held together with spit and duct tape, but it's only a one time thing.
Good luck.
I seem to recall AOL offering a standalone email client based on Thunderbird. If not, I know I've seen people using Thunderbird to access their AOL email. I'd recommend using that (or any standalone email client for that matter) and GMail Loader to import the mail into GMail. That's how I transitioned email from all of my old accounts into GMail.
Outsource it, baby! I'm pretty sure that there are companies in India or Bangladesh which would forward e-mail to your father's Gmail account, one e-mail at a time!
You've had mail!
clicky clicky
It might be a bit twisted, but it might also get the job done simply...
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
You want all of his old mail put into his gmail account so that he can cancel AOL; not continue to allow him to access AOL mail from the regular net instead of the client which most likely would require keeping AOL access (even "AOL Over Broadband" which is such a miserable ripoff).
The trick is going to be parsing the messages he has on his computer and mailing them into his gmail account.
Does he have an ISP email account? Probably the simplest thing to do would be set up a script that takes the messages out of his mail file and sends them from his ISP email system (set up through Thunderbird, Eudora, Outlook Express, whatever) into GMail. Then, erase all the AOL poison. (I'm not a flaming sword wielding OS zealot; but I **despise** AOL for their business practices and their fairly successful campaign to convince everyday people that AOL is the Internet).
This would probably be a good time to clean up all that email though! When is he ever going to go through all that again?? He's very lucky he hasn't lost it before now.
I wouldn't be surprised if you found an AOL2GMAIL program somewhere or even a mail2gmail that could be tweaked to do the trick.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
There is (or at least, was) a $3/month AOL plan that only gave access to webmail. I don't see it advertised anywhere, so you may have to call them to find out if it's still offered. You'd probably have to threaten to cancel to get them to admit it exists.
rooooar
The real problem which I encountered many years ago is that the AOL client software uses a proprietary format and they are, naturally, not eager to help you export your mail.
Fortunately, others have solved this problem. Unfortunately it only exports to Outlook formats but then you can use a different program to convert to mbox or a variety of other formats and from there you could probably send it to Google. (These programs were discovered through an arduous 10 seconds of Googling.)
But why not import it all into Thunderbird and just use the email address your cable company offers? Alternately, if you are desparate to use Gmail, use the pop feature on Gmail to download the mail into Thunderbird.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
I know I'm not answering your question, but before commiting your dad's thousands of messages, remember that Gmail is still in beta. I still get messages like "can't access your mailbox. cross your fingers and try again later" or something to that effect.
Gmail is very convenient, but I'd keep a local copy or backup copy of the messages somewhere just to be safe.
No sig
Using any box with mutt running on it:
- mutt imaps://user@imap.aol.com
- tag everything using "t"
- hit "b" (bounce all tag messages to:)
username@gmail.com
And you're done.
I haven't done this with AOL, per say, but I did it with a few other imap mailboxes I had to transfer everything to gmail.
My god, you're a freak. Forget about tinfoil hats, you probably live in a tin-foil house.
I think they used to charge for the "just webmail" service but now it's free and even supports IMAP. They give you 2GB of space IIRC. For more details:
http://www.aim.com/ (click on webmail)
Have you considered switching him to AIM Mail instead? It's free and probably closer to the AOL experience.
If you can access the email via POP, then just use fetchmail.
Use the flags --smtphost gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com and --smtpname YOURDADSEMAIL@gmail.com
Should do the trick.
When I got married I had to do this with my wifes AOL email. If you forward too many emails in a short period of time AOL will assume your a spammer and automatically freeze your accounts e-mail privilages. Additionally, some people refered to using a mail client and IMAP, but the AOL client stores the email locally in a propritary format. A previous post did mention "aoleave" which has (or points to) a utility to convert the mailbox file. And another post refered to a gmail uploader.
http://members.aol.com/adamkb/aol/mailfaq/imap/
You can download new messages, old messages, saved messages, etc. Combined with an IMAP-aware utility that can download all mail from an account (imapsync, fetchmail, whatever) you're set.
If you had a life, a job or even a school you were attending, you wouldn't have nearly enough time to set up and maintain a mail server. And if you weren't just trying to be cool and out-geek somebody, you'd go the easy way.
Before you walk a mile in someone's shoes, you should insult them so you know how they are and what they're doing.
There's something to be said for having your own mail server, and there's something to be said against it too. Keeping an email server up and running for decades is not a trivial task that will take zero time. No, gmail isn't a perfect answer, but it's a pretty good one -- I can access it anywhere, and I can be reasonably sure that in the next 20 years my email will never change unless I want it to change. And, most important, it doesn't cost me any time (or money) to do so.
-------------------------------------------------
Buy your dad a printer
I'm not sure how AOL works, but you can give Mark Lyon's handy little application a try to forward the old mail to a gmail account. You could download your AOL emails to some local Unix style mailbox and use the app after. There is IMAP support planned, but it's not implemented yet as far as I know. Hope that helps. If not, mod me down!
While this is not a direct answer to the request, it might be helpful in times of distress:
;-)
If you encounter a disrupted organizer (AOLs local storage), you will be able to rescue at most of the message bodies (no pun intended) with
http://wyae.de/software/aolexport/
This will give you only text files containing one (or a few) messages a time - but better than nothing. It won't help you repairing anything nor rescue contacts nor favourites. So just make sure to have a backup copy of your organizer before updating/experimenting...
I have been asked several times to convert ppl over to Linux. What they really wanted was for me to re-install a stolen version of Windows on their systems. Well, great. It is stolen for starters, and secondly, I have not done windows in over a decade (until just 6 months ago).
So help them move to Linux. Every thing is cool. Runs, no issues. Right? Wrong. Pretty soon they want to install new apps. One of them allows you to pay the site $15.00 and you get all the music that you want for free. Wellcome to scam site. They paid, and then expected me to load the app. Even as I explained that it was Windows only (and spyware at that) and that it was going to leave them open to Feds hitting them. But do they listen? No. Finally, they do this 3 more times, and I suggested that they move on over to windows. Last I heard, they are busy downloading music that they paid 15 for (1 time charge), but their system is running slow and they would like me to fix it. shesssh.
Well, at least the others are doing just fine.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Get him a Yahoo! Mail account. Gmail stores all your messages forever even after you have deleted them. Isn't that insane? BTW, as other ppl have said, AOL supports IMAP. Configuring it on Netscape is really easy.
Yeah, and dad probably doesn't want an email address as dad@my1337address.com. Will you buy him a domain name? And pay the money to keep it up every year? Where will you host the server? Will you pay for that?
Free dynamic DNS.
If not, what will you do the day the server dies or you suffer a hard drive failure? What if you're not even in the country when that happens?
Backup servers (486s are practically given away), RAID.
What will you do to ensure that neither you or him lose emails when your IP inevitably changes?
Again, dynamic DNS.
Keeping an email server up and running for decades is not a trivial task that will take zero time. No, gmail isn't a perfect answer, but it's a pretty good one -- I can access it anywhere, and I can be reasonably sure that in the next 20 years my email will never change unless I want it to change.
Will Google be up and running for decades? We're talking about a fscking search engine company! All it takes is one inept CEO to send that baby into the trash heap. Oh, and good luck in trusting a corporation in keeping your info private for 20 years.
And, most important, it doesn't cost me any time (or money) to do so.
My connection is already paid for, adding a free Linux mail daemon is free, I know how to configure it and RAID is running. Like I said real geeks can handle it, most of the Windoze-using computer populace can't.
Tell him it might not be easy now, but were you to be in Soviet Russia, YOUR old e-mail would come looking for YOU!
Well, I've used to be an AOL user, (this is how it was then) and some people seem to be looking at this the wrong way. Not all of your mail is stored on AOLs server. Your personal filing cabinet actually sits on your computers hard drive. When you see mail in your inbox or sent or whatever, it will normally only stay there for a week and then it is downloaded to your computers hard drive, in the form of your personal filing cabinet. Using an IMAP client would allow you to download the messages which are still on AOL's servers, but it wouldn't allow you to retrieve anything from your personal filing cabinet, which stores almost all of your mail. You CAN however access your personal filing cabinet without an AOL account because you don't have to sign on to view it, you can view it offline. So, download the mail from aol using and IMAP client and then kill your aol connection, but don't uninstall AOL from the computer. To view the old mail, just open up your personal filing cabinet. Everytime you find a piece of mail that you need in the personal filing cabinet, just copy and paste it into the new e-mail program. Eventually, you'll just be able to save the personal filing cabinet file and uninstall AOL.
You can use an IMAP client to access your AOL account. If he has anything in his Personal Filing Cabinet (proprietary format for mail saved to the computer), he would have to move it back to the AOL server. From the IMAP client, you could save it locally. I'm not sure about how to get it into gmail from there, but it will at least be out of AOL and stored in a more portable format. Perhaps the GMail wizards are working on an "import your pst/mbox file" feature. One can dream ...
I'm pretty sure that doesn't support your existing aol.com address, though.
I actually am working on this with my family, but after 10 years of AOL, it's pretty ingrained (particularly my Mom who won't get a new anything until what's she's using breaks), so I had to do it in phases (for me, it was about a month between phases, I thought it would be longer).
/. ('nuff said). His worry was everyone who emails him at AOL and I told him just to plan on a two year transition to get everyone to his new account. It took us each like a month to get 99% of our friends over, but some are pretty stubborn, or only email occasionally.
My first target was my brother, who reads
Next was my sister, and she's in college so I just brought it up like it was gossip. Spam was her biggest worry, so I showed her how to have multiple acounts that forward to one, and to make a new one if one gets overrun. Phase II done.
Then my Mom, who actually was a lot easier than I feared. I figured I'd move her over slowly, first to AOL webmail (she wanted to be able to choose where AOL saved her attachments), then let her get used to that, but she was also complaining about spam so I said "I can solve that for you" and moved her over in an hour total. She doesn't email that many people so her transition time was almost zero.
My Dad was the toughest and most stubborn, so I knew I really had to bait him into it. He didn't like paying the $15/month for just email, so I prepared to address that as his reason to switch. A few weeks later he brought it up, and he said he didn't want to force us to leave AOL. I reminded him that the rest of had already switched to gmail, and that I could get him moved over too. He uses his work account for most of his email, so he was also easy to convert once he had a reason to.
I pretty much just had to let everyone decide for themselves that gmail was better than AOL, and while we still subscribe to AOL, I only check it once a week to see if anyone's still emailing me there (last person was two months ago, a friend who I haven't talked to in four years).
Everyone's transition time may vary (depending on how many friends they care about keeping), but it's gotta be on their timetable, if you start prodding them (randomly saying "you know, now that I'm on gmail I don't get any spam" is bad) they'll fight you and then blame you when things aren't exactly like they used to be. If they say "I hate paying $15/month for email", just say "Then don't. I don't". Make them ask all the questions: "Oh really? How come?" "I use gmail." "What's gmail?" "Free email" "I heard those get a lot of spam" "Nope, I don't get any spam." etc. Yes, it goes against your geek nature to back up your statements with facts, but just think of it as your greatest challenge ever. Of course, that's what worked for me, YMMV.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
http://www.aaltonen.us/archive/2004/04/26/tip-bat
Two notes:
Hopefully your outbound mail won't get flagged as spam by larger networks. I used to run my own mailserver, and I ran across this frequently. I guess there were enough spammers from my (then) cable-provided ISP that any mail originating from our IP block was considered spam.
I hated the idea of keeping my mail on someone else's machine, but *shrugs* I don't have anything worth keeping on there any more, anyway. Google wants to read my old correspondance with my ex-girlfriend, let 'em. They want to read all of those geeky RPG forum update notices - who cares. I'm not paying, anyway, and if it gets some fat wank excited to read about my sex life, I can live with that.
What OS does he use? Mac OS perchance?
Back in the Macintosh System 7, Mac OS 7.5 - 8.6 days I used to use a program called Claris Emailer. It was originally written by Fog City Software and later bought by Claris/Apple. It was a great POP email client but could also fetch mail from AOL.
The creators of Claris Emailer updated it with version 2.0, then joined the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit to create the Mac versions of Outlook and Outlook Express, and later, Entourage.
Perhaps that is a potential email download and upgrade path. Download the AOL mail into Claris Emailer, then import the Claris Emailer mailbox into Mac Outlook Express, then import into a more modern mail client such as Entourage, Mail, or Outlook.
Forwarding all your mail to Gmail via Gmail's own SMTP servers is probably the most reliable method of transferring his mail across.
Server: smtp.gmail.com
Port: 465 or 587
Username: yourgooglemailname@gmail.com
Password: yourpassword
Use Authentication: Yes
Use STARTTLS: Yes (some clients call this SSL)
Copy all AOL mail into a standards compliant mail app, using AOL's IMAP server.
Sign up for a free IMAP webmail account at Fastmail
Copy all AOL mail into Fastmail inbox. Wait 15 mins for the web server to sync
Log into fastmail webpage, and select all messages, choose "redirect to" from actions list, and enter gmail address. All messages will be re-sent to gmail with the original senders address. the "received time" will be todays date but the mesage wil keep original sent date within.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Emailchemy
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU