gregtyree.com

So today a colleague got his shiny new MacBook Air. We started talking about the best way for him to get his collection of email archives together and available from any Mac. He has a PC laptop, an iMac and now a MacBook Air - all with email archives - that needed to be gathered up somewhere somehow. We use Exchange but it limits you on your mailbox size so you have to have a strategy for all that old email.

He was thinking he would simply share his Entourage database but I quickly let him know that wasn’t a great idea and ultimately wouldn’t accomplish what he wanted since it uses one big database for everything.

I thought for a while, did a few Google searches, and then decided my advice would be to employ an IMAP server as the best option. Take a Gmail account for example and uses it simply to store old email. Any machine can access via IMAP and this also gives you two way synchronization.

I did a few tests to make sure it would work and then decided I might like to do the same. I have a few old personal folders from my Outlook days and plenty more stored in my local Entourage identity that can all live safely in Gmail and I have access via any machine.

I have found a few idiosyncrasies in dealing with the actual migration. First you can’t simply drop folders in to the IMAP account (at least within Entourage) so I had to create folders and subfolders and just drag and drop the email. Second you need to be careful clicking on the ‘All Mail’ folder - after copying several thousand emails up it took a while for it do pull those all down for my view. That is a one time hit of course and overall I think I have a new way to keep my email organized and available on all my machines.