However, I was posed with a problem: I had almost 2 years worth of e-mail in Evolution. How do I get my Evolution Inbox to the land of Gmail? (Oddly enough, a lot of this e-mail went from Outlook 2003 -> Thunderbird for Windows -> Evolution)

Fortunately, Evolution makes this easy for sysadmin types. Evolution will export e-mail in mbox format.

In Evolution, you’ll want to dump all of your e-mail back into one folder, if you had filters that sorted it to hell and back. Then, you’ll want to hit Select All, and then File->Save Message. Name it something meaningful, and add .mbox on the end if you wish. I compressed the little booger into a tarball and then gzipped it.

Now on my e-mail server, which runs Qpopper and Exim, I made a new e-mail account. I uploaded the mbox archive to my home directory on my mail server, extracted it, and shoved it over to the /var/spool/mail directory in place of the original spool file for the new account I made.

Then I just pointed Gmail at the new account. Presto! I have all of my old e-mail in Gmail.

I really can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.

I’m considering offering a free service where you can upload an mbox file into a webapp, and then a temporary POP account from that mbox will be made just so you can pull the e-mail in to Gmail or etc.

Leave me your thoughts in the comments!