Migrating Your PINE email to gmail

Finally, I got a gmail account, which has been stiring some
controversy and huss around the internet. I guess I got it
pretty late, compared to other avid bloggers. So when I got
it, the gmail website already pretty unstable and give
you the "oops, I did it again!' kind of error messages.

Several catches of this gmail thing:

1. first, it is thing by invitation only thing. And,
this invitation is sort of having its own algorithms.
According to my friend's survey, this invitation is
sent out to every new gmail user (as of June 19th, 2004)
after they become a gmail member for 5-6 days. You
don't need to be an active user to get one. But
recently since the system become unstable, it seems
that they stop giving it out. We will see how this
thing evolves again. But hopefully I can get some
more invitation to give out.

2. You cannot send attachment with more than 10MB which
is a pain for a computer freak like me. 10MB? n*****, please.

Here is the real deal. I used to use PINE on UNIX to
receive my emails through IMAP. Now I am able to
migrate all my email on PINE to my new gmail account.
This is how I do it.

You must have a new email account (e.g. at href="http://www.gmail.com/">GMAIL) to use and have checked the email
address is working first. Of course the new account will need room to store all
the email that you send on.

After you start the process, the pine become busy or
unresponsive for a while. So you just need to cross your
finger and wait. Also, it seems that gmail doesn't support
attachments with more than 10 MB.

It is possible to apply PINE commands (such as 'Bounce') to more than one
mail message in a folder at a time. To enable these features you first need to
alter your default PINE configuration on UNIX. From
PINE's Main Menu do as follows:

• Select S (SETUP)



• Select C (Config)



• Type W after which you will be prompted for a word to find



• Type aggregate and press return. You will be taken to the
  entry:
  
  

  
  [ ]  enable-aggregate-command-set
  
  

  
  



• Press return or X to enable the feature and have it checked
  
  
  

  
  [X]  enable-aggregate-command-set
  
  

  
  



• Type W (Where is) after which you will be prompted for a word to
  find



• Type enable-bounce and press return. You will be taken to the
  entry:
  
  
  

  
  [ ]  enable-bounce-cmd
  
  

  
  



• Press return or X to enable this feature and have it checked
  
  

  
  [X]  enable-bounce-cmd
  
  

  
  



• Select E (Exit Setup) followed by Y to save your
  configuration changes

Note that you only have to do this once; the features remain enabled unless
you change them again.

• From the main PINE menu select:
  
  
  

  
  L     FOLDER LIST        -  Select a folder OR news group to view
  
  

  
  



• Highlight a folder then view its contents by pressing Return

You can now select all of messages in the folder, as follows:

• When the normal message index is displayed, type ;
  
  which will bring up a choice of SELECT criteria:
  
  

  
              A select All     N Number   T Text
  
  
  
  ^C Cancel   C [select Cur]   D Date     S Status
  
  
  
  

  
  



• Type A to select all the messages in the folder. Selected messages
  will be marked with an 'X'.

• Type N to select a range which you want
  of the messages in the folder. Such as "1-2999" or "1,3".
  

• Type h to full headers to be sent with
  the messages, this selection is optional but will maintain
  all relevant email headers, which can be important in some
  situations.
  

You can now 'Bounce' all of the selected messages as follows:

• Type A and you will see the APPLY command list:
  
  

  
              D Del     R Reply     Y prYnt      S Save       B Bounce
  
  
  
  ^C Cancel   U Undel   F Forward   T TakeAddr   E Export
  
  

  
  



• Type B to 'Bounce' the messages and you will see
  
  
  

  
  BOUNCE (redirect) ??? messages to :
  
  

  
  



• Type in your new email address and then press Return.



• When asked
  
  

  
  Send ?? messages to 'you@new.email.address' ?
  
  

  
  
  type Y.

Please note that, unlike some other commands, bounce neither marks the message
as 'deleted' nor duplicates it.

The message will arrive at your new email address almost like they had been
sent to that email address in the first place. Repeat the select and bounce
process for other email folders that you need to transfer.

After you migrated all your emails from PINE, either from the
IMAP folder or your local folder from your file system, you
can use the same "APPLY" rule to delete or save the
messages.

OK. Now enjoy your 1GB storage, I already used 99MB just by migrating.