OmarUddin.com - Omar’s Blog about music, djing, business, technology, science and more

Well I’ve finally had enough of dealing with non-web mail based email clients like Outlook. I still like the calendaring features of it but other than that, making sure my email is stable is no trivial task. My friend Vidyut Luther, http://www.linuxpowered.com, has been kind enough to host my email and some domains for a few years and I hate to bother him with requests for new email accounts and so forth.

With the popularity of Google and it’s ever growing number of tools and free services, it seemed time for me to evaluate all of the new Google Apps suite that is now being offered. Without reading Google’s marketing blurbs, in a gist, Google Apps is a suite of simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools for your organization without the usual hassle and cost to maintain.

I was concerned about a few things for the various domains/accounts that I needed to migrate:

• Easy to migrate and administer email accounts and mail domains
• Easy to import old mail
• Reliable access to my webmail
• Better spam protection / filtering

If you follow Google Apps setup instructions most of the above concerns are pretty easy, although the one remaining item “Easy to import old mail” was a mystery to me until today.

This is an excerpt from another gmail import tool site on how to import mail from your existing pop3-enabled mail server:

UPDATE 12/29/06: If your mail is stored on a POP3 server, Google has an option that allows you to directly import that mail into GMail. Inside your GMail account, click the “Settings” option, choose “Accounts”, and then complete the “Add another mail account” information to have GMail fetch your mail from a remote POP3 server.