This blog post is probably out of date. If you want to set up Exchange ActiveSync, you should instead consult one my guides:
	iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Setup		iPad Exchange ActiveSync Setup
	iPhone ActiveSync Troubleshooting		iPad ActiveSync Troubleshooting

That's right: I now have five Exchange ActiveSync accounts on my iPhone!

Among the many exciting features of Apple’s version-4 iPhone OS is the long-awaited ability to sync to multiple Exchange ActiveSync servers. The new software, now dubbed iOS 4, can synchronize mail, contacts, and calendars between many different services that use Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync protocol, including Microsoft Exchange 2003, 2007, and 2010 and Google’s Gmail service.

Who Needs Multiple Exchange Servers?

You may be wondering if you need this capability. After all, only business people commonly use Microsoft’s corporate Exchange email server, and they tend to only have a single account. But Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync protocol is widespread: It is supported by Google Gmail, Microsoft Live Hotmail, and many other services. Contrary to expectations, most people actually do have an Exchange ActiveSync account, and many have more than one!

I currently use no less than five Exchange ActiveSync accounts, and I’m very pleased to have all of them successfully synchronized with my iPhone. I use Google’s Gmail service for personal mail as well as two Google Apps domains (GestaltIT.com and Fosketts.net). I also have two genuine Microsoft Exchange server accounts belonging to corporate clients. It’s amazing to have all of these up and running on the iPhone!

How To Set Up Multiple Exchange ActiveSync Accounts

Setting up a Google account as Exchange instead of IMAP brings additional functionality

It’s really quite simple to set up multiple Exchange ActiveSync accounts in iOS 4: You just do it. Where the old iPhone OS would complain if you tried to enter a second Exchange ActiveSync account, iOS 4 happily accepts them. It’s not clear what the limit is: I set up five Exchange accounts and see no limit in sight!

Refer to my iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide for step-by-step instructions on setting up Exchange ActiveSync on the iPhone. I’ve also put together an iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide.

Note that many folks, like me, had already added their extra Gmail and Exchange accounts as IMAP, since the old iPhone OS had no trouble with these. In this case, you should disable these accounts first to avoid trouble. I decided to turn off my old IMAP accounts rather than deleting them, just in case I needed to fall back to this method in the future.

Look at that! A unified inbox! But why all those other inboxes?

Note that iOS 4 also includes two long-awaited features: A unified inbox and threaded message view. These work great with multiple Exchange ActiveSync accounts, allowing quick access to all your messages.

Quirks and Bugs

Apple seems to have used an incorrect (too short) Exchange server timeout. If you are running iOS 4.0, you should install the Exchange timeout profile (per Apple TS3398) by clicking here from the iPhone and rebooting.

Although iOS 4 mail is much nicer, it’s far from perfect. Most importantly, all this only works on iOS 4 compatible hardware: The iPhone 3G, 3GS, and 4. The original iPhone has to stick with 3.0 and its single-Exchange limit.

Apple may have added a unified inbox, but they made the mail app list even more cluttered by listing everything three times: Once in the unified inbox, again with a line-item per account inbox, and a third time per-account. Odd.

By default, every Exchange account added is named “Exchange” rather than using the email address like other account types. This is ugly, and requires the user to manually change the account name in Settings->Mail to avoid confusion.

It took a while for the Calendar app to synchronize, and it used incorrect calendar names for a while. Also, it seems to only synchronize the default calendar, not any others you might have.

iOS 4 will happily maintain duplicate contacts in one or more lists. I synchronized Address Book with Gmail and Entourage, so all of my contacts were listed four times. It’s probably best to synchronize only one contact list to avoid this situation.

Pay no mind: You won't lose all your Exchange contacts, just those from this account!

When you turn off contact synchronization, iOS 4 pops up a disturbing warning that “all Exchange contacts will be removed.” They won’t. It will only delete the contacts from that one Exchange ActiveSync account.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | How To Set Up Multiple Exchange ActiveSync Accounts in iPhone iOS 4
This post was categorized as Apple, Everything, Features, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Why Share a Calendar?

Google CalDAV keeps my busy family calendar in sync

With three active kids, my family has a lot going on. My wife, our au pair, and I are always heading in different directions, and new appointments are often added literally “in the field.” Baseball practice is rescheduled, a special ballet session is added, maybe a birthday party on Saturday. The iPhone makes it simple to add these events to a calendar, but it’s easy to forget or get out of sync.

Most devices can subscribe to multiple Internet-enabled calendar services and present a unified view. This includes iPhones, iPads, Blackberries, Androids, and popular desktop applications. Many services are read-only – that is, subscribers may view but not create or modify calendar items. But the CalDAV protocol allows any linked device to not only display events but create and update them as well!

What You Need

Google added CalDAV support back in July of 2008, and Apple added read/write support a year later in iPhone OS 3.0, so the iPad has always had this capability. Most other devices and applications support CalDAV as well.

You will probably want to create a special Gmail or Google Apps account just for this use. I use Google Apps for the Fosketts.net domain, so I created an account called “activities”. A regular Gmail account would probably work as well, but you’ll need to select a unique (and probably fairly odd) name.

Set It Up on iPhone or iPad

These instructions are specific to the iPhone or iPad, but other devices probably use similar steps.

1. Create a new Gmail or Google Apps account to use as the shared calendar. I called mine “activities@fosketts.net” but yours could use any name.
2. On the iPhone or iPad, enter the Settings screen.
3. Select “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”
4. Select “Add Account…”


Add an "Other" account in "Mail, Contacts, Calendars", then select "Add CalDAV Account"

5. Select “Other” – don’t just add it as a Gmail account!
6. Select “Add CalDAV Account”


Enter "www.google.com" for the server and your full Gmail or Apps email address as "User Name"

7. Enter “www.google.com” for the “Server”
8. Enter your full calendar account address for “User Name” (e.g. “activities@fosketts.net”)
9. Enter the account password
10. Enter a description (e.g. “Family Activities”)
11. The iPhone or iPad will now auto-detect Google’s CalDAV settings and configure the account

That’s all there is to it!

Using the Shared Calendar

Sharing a calendar is just like sharing an email account: Every device synchronizes its content with the server and new items are distributed automatically. Just remember to select this calendar whenever you create shared events, since it might not be the default.

Let’s walk through the creation of a new event on an iPhone or iPad:

1. Open the “Calendar” app
2. Tap the “+” sign to create a new event
3. In the “Add Event” screen, enter the Title, Location, Start and End time, etc.
4. Set any desired “Alert” items here – they’ll be synchronized too!
5. Tap “Calendar” and select the shared activities calendar – it might not be the default!
6. Tap “Done” and the iPhone or iPad will immediately send this new event to Google’s CalDAV server. It should show up on all subscribed phones and other devices within an hour.

Gotchas

The main gotcha is simply using the wrong calendar. Make sure you select this shared CalDAV calendar every time you add a shared calendar entry. If it’s not selected, it won’t be shared!

CalDAV is a great protocol, but sometimes it’s a little too thorough. Any changes made to the Alerts will propagate to all connected phones or other clients. If someone else adds an event, you may be surprised to have alerts begin showing up for events you didn’t create. They might also change the Alerts, adding a second or third alarm or email notification.

Google defaults to sending an email and pop-up alert before any event created, and these settings spill down to the iPhone, iPad, or iCal on OS X. I was pulling out my hair trying to stop the emails before I figured out I needed to remove them under “Settings”->”Notification” at calendar.google.com. Otherwise, they would automatically reappear even after I removed them in iCal!

Two-way sync only works with CalDAV, so devices that only support ICS can view but not create or update calendar items.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | How To Keep Your Family Activities In Sync With A Shared Google Calendar
This post was categorized as Everything, Features, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Why Do They Hate Me?

Last week I wondered out loud about this: When did everyone get so cynical and disillusioned with Google? It’s ironic that answers rolled in on Twitter and FriendFeed even as Google was stomping into their turf with Buzz. What response did I get?

1. Google’s corporate censorship moves, especially in China, look pretty evil to some
2. Google’s lack of innovation outside search, especially its repeated attempts to “take over” social media, soured many
3. The poor and informal customer support provided by Google is notorious
4. Many just don’t “get” Google’s mission anymore – are they a search engine, an advertising platform, a software or hardware vendor, or what?

Companies are going to make mistakes, especially massive and aggressive ones like Google. It is inevitable that their compromised position on freedom of speech in China (and India) would raise hackles, but the company apparently decided it was acceptable to gain entry there. But many of Google’s other moves are more troubling to some.

Paved With Good Intentions?

Almost every penny of Google’s prodigious revenue comes from personalized advertising. Google plainly states this in their annual reports: “Advertising revenues made up 99% of our revenues in 2006 and 2007 and 97% of our revenues in 2008.” The company spends about 13% of this revenue on research and development, 9% on sales and marketing, 7% on administration, and 5% on stock-based compensation. I imagine many of these numbers will come as a shock to average Internet users, many of whom probably assumed Google was less dependent on advertising revenue and spent much more money to employ and house so many great software developers.

Google’s stated mission may be “to organize the world’s information,” but that’s not what the company actually does. It runs a massive collection of Internet properties which serve to collect personal information and serve advertisements. Many of Google’s employees seem to be genuinely interested in making the world a better place, or at least organizing the world’s information, but good intentions don’t pay the bills. Shortly after launching its eponymous search service, Google began gobbling up the lucrative advertising market it now dominates.

Not everyone is bothered by this. Many, including myself, are happy users of Google’s excellent products, including search, Gmail, Reader, News, and Maps. I’ll knowingly put up with targeted ads to subsidize these services because I trust that Google really is anonymizing and protecting my information. I’m sure most users don’t really think much about privacy and freedom when searching the Internet or sending an email, but even those that do have been content with Google.

Yet even Google fans have to admit that not every product is excellent. Many, like Wave, seem half-baked while others, like Orkut, seem more like misfires. Google almost missed the boat on the social web and now seems desperate to catch up. Core technology like PubSubHubbub is heading in the right direction, but Google has been unable to stitch it all together. Perhaps Buzz will be able to ride Gmail’s coattails to success, but we have seen so many failures before.

What Is Google?

I think the core criticism of Google is more fundamental than concern about censorship, advertising, privacy, or failed products. Instead, alarms are ringing at Google’s repeated and well-funded attempts to be much more than an organizer of information.

In 2008, the company tried and failed to muscle in on wireless spectrum, a move many thought was a carefully executed trick to force open the United States mobile phone market. They then introduced their own mobile phone operating system, Android, putting themselves in direct competition with Symbian, Microsoft, and especially Apple. This intensified with the Google-branded Nexus One, the removal of CEO Eric Schmidt from Apple’s board, and the launch of multi-touch features. Google seems to be stepping up to directly challenge Apple for dominance of the new mobile computing world.

The company is also moving into fixed broadband, offering temporarily-free Wi-Fi at major airports and announcing a plan to give free gigabit fiber optic service to communities in the United States. They are becoming a telecom company with Voice, and some have suggested a buyout of T-Mobile or the launch of Google-branded phone service. Google is also a cloud computing company, a hosting provider, and even an electric power company.

Even if all of these moves are taken as support of the company’s core mission, they do lead one to question Google’s corporate mission. If their advertising business wasn’t the limitless cash cow it has historically been, I’m sure Google’s investors would be asking some hard questions. What business does an advertising company have supporting blimps, gene sequencing, and electric cars?

Even if you are not worried about the money or the wisdom of these investments, it begs the question, “what is Google?” I believe this is the source of Google’s buzz-kill. In dominating the Internet, Google has tapped into a vein of confusion, concern, mistrust, schadenfreude, and downright hostility. I suppose it comes with the territory.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Google’s Evil Buzz Is Building
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Drobo Email Basics

In keeping with the Drobo “simplicity” mandate, there are just a few decisions to make regarding Drobo Dashboard email:

1. How much email do you want? Drobo Dashboard can send messages for general information, when an important event arises, or only in critical situations. I selected the middle (default) setting.
2. Where should the email go? You can put in any address you like (perhaps you have a special account for high priority mail) but I decided to send to my regular email address.
3. Who should the “sender” be? You can enter any address you like, but I decided to use a special (but non-existent)  ”drobo@fosketts.net” address so I can filter the messages with Gmail.

Get started by selecting “Email Settings” from the Drobo Dashboard menu, then follow the steps below!

Note that the email messages will be sent from Google, but can be sent to any account. Use these steps regardless of which account you are mailing to.

Configuring Gmail

Configuring Drobo to send mail using regular Gmail is a snap!

If you’re using basic Gmail service (ie, your address is “whatever@gmail.com”) you should fill in the fields as follows:

1. Enter your own address as the “To E-mail Address”
2. Enter anything you like as the “From E-mail Address”
3. Enter “smtp.gmail.com” as the “Mail Server”
4. Enter “587″ as the “Port”
5. Check the “Authentication” box
6. Enter your valid Gmail address as the “Username”
7. Enter your valid Gmail password as the “Password”
8. Check the “Use SSL” box

Now just click “Send Test E-mail” to make sure it works. If you get the message, click OK and you’re done!

Configuring Google Apps

Google Apps configuration is very similar

Google Apps users might be confused what to enter where. But it’s really no different than basic Gmail! Just fill in the fields as follows:

1. Enter your own address as the “To E-mail Address”
2. Enter anything you like as the “From E-mail Address”
3. Enter “smtp.gmail.com” as the “Mail Server”
4. Enter “587″ as the “Port”
5. Check the “Authentication” box
6. Enter your valid Google Apps email address as the “Username”
7. Enter your valid Google Apps email password as the “Password”
8. Check the “Use SSL” box

Now just click “Send Test E-mail” to make sure it works. If you get the message, click OK and you’re done!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | How To Configure Drobo Dashboard Email for Gmail and Google Apps
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Note: This post is about Google, because it is by far the dominant search engine, advertiser, and “portal” in the English-speaking world. Nearly everything mentioned here applies equally to other search engines and advertising providers.

Ranking Pages

Google’s relevance comes from their historical ability to present a quality searchable portal to the entire Internet. The majority of Google’s revenue is also derived from quality information, giving them the ability to present more-compelling advertising to web users.

Google’s core success is based on its ability to discover and rank the quality of Internet content. Gmail, Reader, Picasa, Apps, and the rest of the Google properties are surely excellent sources of information on the preferences of individual users, but they contribute only slightly to the other side of the coin: Information about Internet content. For that, they still rely on the core technology invented at Stanford a decade ago: PageRank.

Every time it encounters a link, Google’s software “spider” follows it, adding the content of the linked web page to an index. Google, like other early search engines, counts each link as a vote for the quality of the page. The genius of PageRank is that Google weights each vote based on the quality of the page it comes from. Although PageRank is not the entirety of Google, it is a singular key element.

Put simply, Google’s success depends on its ability to gather and rank the links we all make and match them to the data we provide about ourselves. Without this, Google will fail.

The Changing Web

The graphical Web is not the Internet. My first experiences online came well before graphical hypertext clients (what we now call browsers) dominated the user experience and became the web. Although the network we call the Internet now supports a very wide variety of traffic, Google’s preeminence comes only from the Web. They have little or no reach into the massive streams of corporate data, multimedia, and other non-hypertext content streaming across the ‘net.

When it was first developed, the web was manual and links were hand-selected and carefully put into context. It was difficult to put together a web page, and those pages that were developed were were static. The social networks of the time (USENET, IRC, and email mostly) were not integrated into the web, did not generally include links. So the first search engines, and later ones like Google, focused on this relatively small pool of pages and links.

But the web soon became automated, subsuming most other interactive services. Social (user-generated) interaction moved into the web in a big way, with blogs, wikis, and discussion forums enabling rapid content creation and reference by users. Sharing links in the social web, and through social bookmarking services, generally replaced the manual pages of old.

At first, this explosion of user-generated content was a dream scenario for Google. They could harvest the collective intelligence of us all to identify and rank content. But as the number of pages and links exploded, the notion of a “web page” was radically shifted from a stable and predictable set of data to a dynamic portal into a vast store of content. Where everyone once saw the same content at a given URL, now each of us has his own experience.

Spammers and scammers realized the value of Google placement and flooded this dynamic social web with links. This threatened not only to undermine the relevance that supports Google’s search (and advertising) business, but it also threatened these new social services themselves. Each honest, relevant link added to a Wikipedia article, included in a Slashdot comment, or shared on a service like Digg was dwarfed by the thousands or millions of spam links injected to boost the PageRank of “client” sites.

I Don’t Follow

Google and the social net fought valiantly against this wave of link spam, but it became clear that something more radical was needed. The only way to fight spam was to make it useless to the spammers. Thus was born a simple but highly-effective tool: Nofollow.

Webmasters long had the ability to tell the Google spider to ignore a certain set of hosted pages through the use of a server-side list called robots.txt. But spammers wanted the exact opposite. What was needed was a client-side way to specify that a link was not worthy of being spidered and ranked by the search engines. This would eliminate the primary benefit of link spam.

Implementing client-side spider blocking was trivial: A simple tag, “rel=nofollow”, was added alongside the url in a web link. This way, Google’s spider would simply ignore every “nofollow” link it encountered, and they would never be searched or ranked in the index.

But spammers would never put the nofollow tag in their own links. So sites quickly began implementing blanket nofollow policies: Every link submitted by users in any form would receive the tag by default. The idea would be that links that had not yet been vetted by users would get the nofollow tag and those that were deemed acceptable would not. But most sites never figured out the right process to allow the nofollow tag to be removed. Today, nearly every social service, from FaceBook to Twitter to Digg to StumbleUpon, permanently marks nearly every link this way. Even Wikipedia, a long-time holdout, finally switched to a default nofollow on all but the English site.

The Nofollow War

What does this mean for Google? If the vast majority of user-generated links are tossed into the spam category as far as the search engine is concerned, it means that their entire system of discovering and ranking links is in jeopardy. The major social services, most of which attract the majority of end-user traffic, content, and links, are rendered useless in generating relevancy.

But these are the exact sources that Google ought to be focusing on the most. Many have noted that they hear about news more rapidly through real-time sources like Twitter than through less-dynamic traditional news sites and blogs. Even if Google had the ability to spider a service like Twitter in real time, which is doubtful, they would gain no insight from the links included in these sources. Social bookmarking sites like Digg are chock full of user-vetted links and should be gold mines for Google, but the nofollow tag makes them invisible.

This scarcity of user-generated links has made the links that are followable even more valuable. Scammers constantly create fake blogs of scraped (read “stolen”) content and users are paid to include followable links anywhere they can. Sites with a high PageRank value are constantly inundated with offers and attacked by hackers to siphon off high-value “votes”.

High-profile content providers are circling their wagons, drastically cutting down on outside links in order to focus PageRank on their own properties. Smaller publishers and blogs are striking back at the big guys, decrying their dearth of external links. Some even go so far as to initiate blanket nofollow policies against these big, respected, but non-linking sites.

This leaves Google with even fewer useful links with which to examine the Web. It also leaves the biggest content providers and networks and the savviest search engine optimization (SEO) pros with a bigger slice of the valuable top-of-Google result real estate.

The Fix Is In

Google is left with a looming nightmare scenario: As smaller, alternative, social, and real-time content providers disappear from the search engine, its overall relevance and value declines. Soon, a tipping point will be reached when users would rather rely on Twitter, FaceBook, and the rest for their Internet interactions than the old-fashioned search engine, email, and RSS readers that Google currently dominates. This house-of-cards collapse can only be avoided by including user-generated content in the Google index.

Search engines could simply ignore the nofollow tag, wading into the social stream and combatting spam in other ways. But this would lead to another rapid upswing of link spam, shifting the burden to content providers once again. And it might also expose links that actually should not be followed, leading to technical and even legal trouble.

The best solution would see the social networks designing in some method of removing the nofollow attribute once links are verified to be relevant and correct. But there is no incentive for them to help drive Google traffic to other sites. Indeed, Twitter recently took the next step, arranging the titles of user pages in an attempt to SEO their way to the top page of Google searches for user’s names. Only altruistic systems like Wikipedia are likely to design in this type of response.

Another possible scenario (to be explored another day) is the usurpation of today’s social web and its content by a new next-generation service. A web-based social client like FriendFeed could rapidly siphon away both existing and net-new content and users in the guise of openness and interoperability. Although new web spiders like Cuil have failed, perhaps old-fashioned crawling capability is no longer all that valuable in the social web.

The most likely fix is both predictable and pragmatic: Google must buy all successful source of social links (like Twitter, Bit.ly, StumbleUpon, and even FaceBook) and integrate them into their search system. Owning Twitter would enable Google to decide which links to follow and which to ignore. The reward of improving search results would be the incentive needed to add “re-follow” capability. Buying these services would also give Google an open pipe of the real-time traffic flowing through these services, a critical resource that they currently lack.

Google simply can not afford not owning the real-time web, and they must continue to buy up similar sources of content as they appear. Yahoo was unable to extract value from StumbleUpon, but Google’s other competitors will certainly try to undermine the search giant. Frankly, I’m shocked that Microsoft, FaceBook, or even Baidu have not yet snapped up services like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Digg even if only to keep them and the information they contain out of Google’s hands.

If you enjoyed reading this, you’ll probably also like my Foskett Services blog!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Google Is Heading For A Cliff; What Will They Do?
This post was categorized as Computer History, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Enterprise IT

• Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle Your Reliance On Backup Tapes – What’s wrong with backup tapes? They’re inaccessible, making them unsuitable for most applications. My latest post for my Enterprise Storage Strategies blog.
• Is Licensing Turning vSphere Into Vista? – A group post for Gestalt IT suggesting that VMware’s tiered licensing strategy for the vSphere 4 family might cause anguish for customers
• Infosmack Episode 2 – EMC, David Donatelli and Non-Compete Agreements – I joined the StorageMonkeys Infosmack podcast to discuss EMC, Dave Donatelli, and con-compete agreements with Greg Knieriemen, Marc Farley of 3Par and StorageRap, and Tony Asaro of the INI Group
• IT utilities, the biggest game in town – Chris Mellor of The Register suggests that the biggest IT vendors are positioning to lock up the IT market.
• The Non-Compete Clause Debate….. - Steve Duplessie muses on the pros and cons of non-compete agreements and what they mean for the IT industry
• Who’s the pot & who’s the kettle? - W. Curtis Preston reacts to the skirmishes between Tony Asaro and the EMC bloggers
• The Only VMware-certified NAS in its Category: Why the Iomega StorCenter ix4-200r Will Resonate with Small Businesses - Jerome Wendt expands on the Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-200r
• Don’t focus too much on costs, cloud computing is about business agility - CapGemini reminds us that cloud computing isn’t just about reducing costs
• What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing - The Google Enterprise blog lays down some of the hard facts about building a cloud on your own
• Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System - Chris Evans provides one of the best reviews yet of Sun’s Amber Road open source-based storage systems
• Brocade Pokes Cisco in the Eye, Switches for IBM - A great headline and solid reporting by Om Malik on one of the first reactions to Cisco UCS
• TheInfoPro: Analysis or Marketing? - StorageMonkeys continues their probing of the storage analyst community
• A “Tweeterview” with Stephen Foskett, Nirvanix Consulting Director - Sunshine interviews me about Nirvanix, storage, and my new role

Apple

• Achieving Email Bliss with IMAP, Gmail, and Apple Mail – A deep, long post on GMail, IMAP, Mac OS X Mail, and how to get all three to play nicely together.
• Monitor Your Mac Remotely With iStat for iPhone - I love iStat for Mac OS X and the iPhone and had been meaning to write a review. This AppleBlog post is just about what I might have written!

Life

• There Goes Chrysler – NPR’s awesome Planet Money blog reported the breaking news of Chrysler’s bankruptcy
• The Venture Capital Math Problem and The Venture Capital Math Problem (continued) – Fred Wilson points out that there can be no such thing as unlimited venture capital
• Is it time to cut the Ethernet access cable? – Has pervasive wireless Ethernet made wired ports unnecessary?
• Interview with Micah Baldwin, Father of FollowFriday – Micah calls me out as someone who is doing interesting things on Twitter!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Content From the Week of May 2, 2009
This post was categorized as Everything. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

I love that Gmail keeps all of my email online and easily searchable – when I need to locate some old bit of information, I can usually find it by typing a couple of words into the Gmail search box, no matter where I am. Since I travel a lot, I’ll often log into Gmail from my work laptop, a hotel PC, or my iPhone just for this purpose.

But the other day, I remembered a message my dad sent me a few years ago and wanted to look it up. I was stuck, though, because the message was sitting in a PST on my (powered-off) desktop back at home. I was able to get to it from my laptop through a complicated process that involved ssh, my Tomato-powered router, wake-on-LAN, and remote desktop… Not something I wanted to go through again!

I got thinking that I’d love to have all of my mail in Gmail – even those messages from before I started using it. Turns out, lots of people were thinking about this way back when, but it’s always been difficult to import mail into Gmail, and lots of folks think it still is. But I found that, thanks to Gmail’s new IMAP feature, it’s now super easy to get your PST (and Thunderbird, etc) mail into Gmail! Read on for how I did it, and how you can too!

It used to be pretty difficult to get messages into Gmail, and most solutions revolved around re-mailing old messages to your new Gmail account, or having Gmail access a POP server and import messages for you. Neither of these effectively solved the problem of mail stored in Outlook PST files, though. If you had a PST, you needed to extract them into a standard format and (try to) use a Gmail mailer like GML to import them. This may work for you, but it didn’t work for me and I don’t suggest it.

The new (functional) method I used simply uses Outlook to move messages in bulk over an IMAP connection. IMAP lets the Outlook directly access folders on a remote mail server for drag and drop mail operations, and this is the functionality we’re leveraging with Gmail.

Gmail doesn’t have folders, of course, but it spoofs them with labels. So when you access a Gmail account with an IMAP server, your labels show up as folders, and when you drop a message into one of these “folders”, it simply gets that label in Gmail. Note that it does not get an “Inbox” label, however, so you won’t see the message in the Inbox, only when you click on the label or search with the search box. But this works pretty well, and allows you to neatly label old messages as being non-Gmail, which might be helpful.

So let’s say you’re using some version of Outlook (or Outlook Express). Here’s what to do:

1. Enable IMAP in your Gmail account settings
2. Configure Outlook to access Gmail per Google’s directions
3. Once you connect to Gmail’s IMAP, you should see all of your labels show up as folders – this is key!
4. In your Gmail account, create a new label for your migrated email – I called it “Old Mail”, clever eh?
5. Now just select all of the messages in each PST folder (control-A is your friend) and drag and drop them on the folder/label you just created
6. Moving messages takes a while – I let it run while I had dinner and found about 2000 messages moved over when I returned

You have now migrated your email to Gmail! Here are a few gotchas I noticed:

• As I mentioned above, the messages will not show up in the Inbox, but can be accessed by clicking on the label or through the search box Update: After a few days, my Gmail inbox does now include all of my “Old Mail”, even those without the “Inbox” label.  Weird.
• Native messages from or to an exchange account also configured in Outlook show up as “Unknown sender” and “No subject” because Gmail can’t figure out their headers. The data is there, and it’s searchable, but not all that readable.
• Gmail de-duplicates messages rather effectively – drag the same message in 12 times and it only shows up once! This is very cool, but can be frustrating if you trash a message and then try to copy it in again, as I did while trying to figure this all out! If it’s in Gmail’s trash, it will never show up in the desired folder!
• For some reason, my iPhone (which uses IMAP to connect) immediately downloaded all the old messages I just copied into my Inbox, bumping my real new mail from its list even though it supposedly sorts by date… So suddenly the top unread messages in my iPhone inbox were dated from 2001 and earlier! Pretty funny, really, but not at all as expected. Mail without the Inbox label (dragged to another folder/label) does not exhibit this problem, though.

Good luck with this, and I hope it helps! By the way, a similar process helped me migrate my even-older mail through Thunderbird…

Update: After others have tried this method, they have reported that Gmail is sorting the messages wrong in the main Inbox list – sorting by date of import rather than date of receipt.  I have no such problem, though Gmail did apparently rescan my “Old Mail” messages and add them to my Inbox at some point over the last few days.  So maybe you have to wait a while?  Also, I wanted to note that I did my import using Outlook 2002, so maybe there are weird effects of using other Outlook versions…

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Import your old Outlook/Express PSTs to Gmail
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