When I purchased my Palm Pre I knew it was time to move to Gmail – as the e-mail on this phone works well with Gmail.  I’d been thinking about it for some time – as Outlook was becoming somewhat annoying and the appeal of access to e-mail anywhere was compelling.  So I decided to make the move for the following reasons:

  1. I was tired of POP3 access on my old Phone – as I would find myself deleting e-mails off both the phone and then later on Outlook.
  2. Gmail can pull in my various POP3 accounts (I have an ISP account, Yahoo and my own website’s e-mail) into one view.
  3. My Palm Pre can then connect to Gmail to show all my e-mail – but NOT download it – only view it.
  4. With IMAP access I can upload my set of old e-mails to Gmail.
  5. I felt comfortable with Gmail – as it was a secure connection and I can enable offline ability.
  6. The world is moving to the cloud – so I might as well go with it.
  7. Finally Outlook was getting annoying – as I was up to 3 different PST files and it was still slow.  That and trying to access the same Outlook files from 2 different computers was problematic (as Outlook would try to re-create a default file every time it couldn’t access a network connection).

Now the fun part was the transition:

  1. IMAP is the tool – as you can move the messages without having to forward, etc.
  2. So I linked my Gmail account in Outlook and copied some messages from Outlook to Gmail. And guess what – Outlook crashed!  It did this everytime I tried it – on 2 different computers.
  3. So Plan B:
    1. I downloaded Thunderbird and attempted to pull in Outlook – but ran into problems with the Import.
    2. So Plan C:
      1. I pulled in the Outlook PST file into Outlook Express – and I had to do this 3 times – as it only pulled in the default “PST” file (so I switched it twice).
      2. I then pulled in the Outlook Express file into Thunderbird.
      3. Now finally I could copy files from my local computer up to Gmail.
      4. I’m actually still working on this as I have a lot of sent mail to copy up.

The cool thing is that I’m only using about 20% of my gmail storage limit – and I have a lot of e-mail!

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