Goatinatree.com Project Blog

So I’ve had this blog/journal for a long time now, since 2002 I think. And I realized that it’s not very often that I do post an entry that resembles that of most other bloggers out there. I’m usually posting about some horrible thing in my life, or something wonderful, but this time, i’m giving back. So I wanted to finally figure out how to import my mail to gmail. I searched the net and couldnt find much of anything I havent tried already. gExodus, gMail Loader, and some other random ones, just never seem to work for me. I converted my dbx(outlook express) mail files to mbox using different programs and even “cleaned” the mbox once it finished converting, but nothing worked flawless for me. The programs would usually stop after like 10, 20, and sometimes 100 messages and just lock up. Well, I remembered that a friend of mine told me he was very successful with his gmail import when he used a program called Fetchmail. I wish i could claim the smarts behind this one, but I cant. Creadit goes to this guy. I figure if its posted in more than one place people will be able to find it easier. I couldn’t find that guys post anywhere in the first couple pages of a google search for gmail import. I’m not a linux guru yet, so i really wasnt sure what distro to install and start my venture into fetchmail. I ended up picking ubuntu because it seemed to be called out as the easiest linux install or something. Dunno. Anyway, i downloaded the ISO and loaded up vmware. 5 minutes later I was able to use the synaptic package manager to install a packaged version of fetchmail and I plugged in the following:

fetchmail -k -a -p IMAP \
-S smtp.server.of.gmail \
–smtpname youremailaddress@gmail.com \
-u username.of.old.mail.server \
–auth password \ <— leave as password, it will ask for the password
-r “inbox”,”inbox/subfolder” \
-v oldmailserver.domain.com

Thats all you have to do. It works amazingly easy and I was able to move over all my mail. On top of moving the mail, I wanted to sort it. I decided that the easiest way of doing this would be to do the move in stages. So, I moved all the inbox mail messages, then archived them and set a label of “oldinbox”. After that I sent over each subfolder, one by one. After each subfolder was done, I set a label to the messages and set them to “read” and archived them. It didnt take long at all and now i have all my messages archived in a safe place.

One of the main reasons for posting this was that I couldnt figure out what to use as the mailbox directories under the -r command. The original poster used inbox, inbox.blah, inbox.bleh, etc. But none of those worked for me. I tried a bunch more before I came to what now seems like a completely logical syntax. Should have started there in the first place. :p

Well, the time has come where I feel as though I need a fresh start. So I deleted my entire journal and started over from scratch. I thought it would be a great way to forget my past and move into the future. lol. Are you insane? Ok, so that was a joke. I dont think I could ever do such a thing, but hey I’m sure it scared someone… :-p I would be devosted if i lost my entire past. This blog has been a representation of my life or lack there of, since my accident. And even though I dont update it as much as I used to, it still has a great deal of stuff in it that I would hate to forget, even the bad stuff.

So the reason my blog is empty is simply because I’ve decided to split my blog into a public blog and a personal blog. The personal blog will still be readable by all, it just wont be sticking out in the wide open space that is my domain.com. Instead it will be located in its old position. There are many benefits to this, one of which is that all the posts I made to my livejournal will now link back to my personal blog as I’ve wanted it to do for a long time. This blog is going to be a little closer to what most blogs are today and its not going to contain personal struggles, triumphs, and the like. It will be based mainly on the project I plan to engage in. I am a computer hardware nut and that has been what I enjoy the most, but it has dawned on me that being able to program is going to get me a lot farther in life, not to mention how awesome it will feel to complete something. I know even when toying with simple html stuff, I really enjoyed the finished product. Now i’m not going for web designer/programmer, but I will see where things end up after I’ve learned a few languages. Even a sys admin needs languages to help get the job done.