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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?"

2 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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.