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Transferring Mail from AOL?

Posted by Cliff on from the preserving-important-content dept.

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?"

13 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Read Slashdot by ike6116 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Tell your dad to get hip and start IMing, e-mail is SOOOOO out these days.

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    1. Re:Read Slashdot by nocomment · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'd actually recomend his dad downgrade his AOL service to the $5/mo service so he can still use his AOL.

      I hope the OP knows that if anything breaks with the new setup he's forcing onto his Dad, it's going to be his fault. Instead I'd recomend he save his Dad some money.

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    2. Re:Read Slashdot by ChadN · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I agree. After years of helping out my family members and friends with their computers, I've learned that "no good deed goes unpunished".

      If there is a way to change to a cheaper AOL service, tell your Dad about it. But think *3* times before taking on the responsibility of changing his email patterns (and protecting his data); unless your Dad is pleading with you for the change, it is almost never worth it to get involved. The effort will not be appreciated nearly as much as you hope, and there will be bad feelings if things don't go absolutely 100% correctly.

      Good luck.

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  2. AOL Leave by rogueuk · · Score: 4, Informative

    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    It looks to be exactly what you are looking for, but it seems to be a little out of date so it may not necessarily work.

  3. IMAP by SeeTheLight · · Score: 5, Informative

    You could use IMAP to grab the mail off of AOL's servers in any IMAP-capable email client, according to their site.

  4. Netscape by Scaba · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

    1. Re:Netscape by moosesocks · · Score: 4, Informative

      First, get your mail into outlook/thunderbird using AOL's IMAP Server.

      Then use your email program's Forward/Redirect (if it has it) function to forward it to your gmail/current account.

      If you want to spend $20, TrueSwitch will automatically do this all for you AND transfer your address book and forward your mail for a month and notify all of your contacts of your address change. This service is free for many ISPs (AT&T, SBC, Yahoo, and MSN come to mind) which is how I know about it...

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  5. IMAP by jm92956n · · Score: 4, Informative
    My suggestion: hire a team of trained monkeys to print out the existing e-mails and manually type them back into gmail.

    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"

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  6. fetchmail + gmail loader ? by grattwood · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  7. Outsource it! by cjsnell · · Score: 3, Funny


    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!

  8. A solution by aakin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:IMAP? by chris462 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I found this app, called GMail Loader:

    http://www.marklyon.org/gmail/

  10. Re:IMAP? by danielrose · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why not set up the IMAP inbox for AOL in any sane mail client, download the mail. Reconfigure the client for POP and gmail. Problem is solved.

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