Google Apps for Domains

Since my provider doesn’t provide SSL, IMAP or a decent webmail reader, I decided to take the plunge today and switch to Google Apps for Domains. Obviously it’ll take some time to see if it’s worth it, but so far I’m liking it. One thing that I was eager to do was move my email to IMAP to take advantage of it’s synchronization features. Seeing as how there are no free import tools from Apple Mail to GMail, I came with an ad-hoc approach that worked for my purposes:

• Archive your Mail inbox to a backup file and then delete your account out of Mail.
• Set up Mail to use your new GMail IMAP account and verify that it works.
• Import your backed up inbox to Apple Mail. This will create a new folder separate from your GMail stuff.
• This is the slow part. Drag about 300 messages at a time into your new GMail inbox folder. Mail will sync these new messages from your machine to the GMail servers while removing them from your import inbox. I had to go through about 3000 messages, so this took about an hour or so.

Your messages will appear in the GMail inbox in the correct date order, but if you sync with an iPhone, you’ll only get the most recently added 50 messages, which are most likely the ones you just imported and are quite old. To get around this, I found this technique in Google groups which worked like a charm:

In your inbox, select all messages (ALL, not just the first page!) Then give them a dummy label like “sort label”. Once you’ve applied this label only to the messages you want to be sorted in your inbox, select all inbox messages again and click “Archive”. This won’t delete your messages, just move them out of the inbox and into the “All Mail” folder. Once your inbox is empty, click on the label you made in the sidebar (e.g. click on “sort label”) to pull up those messages with that label. Then, select all (ALL) messages with that label, and in the drop-down menu above select “Move to inbox.” Once you do this, you can delete that label (it won’t delete your messages) and your inbox messages will now sort correctly on the iPhone.