Google recently announced the arrival of their 1GB web-based email account, GMail.   Many people, including myself tried quite hard to get an invitation to join the public beta, and I eventually was able to get an account thanks to a friend at ArsTechnica. 

Some of the benefits of GMail are the large storage space, easy labeling of messages (instead of sorting into folders), and quick Google-powered searching.  As an email packrat, I jumped at the opportunity to have all my email easily searchable.  I decided I would import all my old email from Netscape Communicator 4.7 (which had messages in it dating back to 1994).  There was no upload feature included with GMail, however.

So I wrote one.  

Originally, the GMail Loader only worked with mBox format files (because it is all I needed) and was command line based.  As others asked for similar functions, I began to expand it.  Today, the GMail Loader is a graphical, cross-platform, Python based utility that supports two mBox formats (Netscape, Mozilla, Thunderbird, Most Other Clients), MailDir (Qmail, others), MMDF (Mutt), MH (NMH), and Babyl (Emacs RMAIL).  Eventually, I plan to add support for direct sending of IMAP accounts, and am working on a library that can read and export Microsoft Outlook PST files.  Until that time, try the ReadPST utility found on the "Other Utilities" page.

The application works by reading your existing mail files, and forwarding them to GMail.  It does not delete the mail from your local computer.  Email can be set to arrive at GMail in either your 'Inbox' or 'Sent Mail'.

GML is free and is licensed to you under the GNU General Public License.  There is a pre-compiled windows version avaiable as well as a source only distribution for other operating systems.  Please see the download page for more information.

I'd like to thank the many people whose assistance have been invaluable.  There are too many people to name, but many of you have sent me copies of broken inbox files, or bug reports, or even suggestions for features and copies of your modifications.  Where possible, all of your suggestions were included in the latest release.  If you encounter problems with the application, help make the next version better by sending me a message at marklyon@gmail.com.  Please include a copy of your log, or if you're using the command line version, the most recent output of the script and the command line you used.

If you'd like to learn more about GMail, or find a palce to have your general questions answered, I'd recommend the GMail Users Group or the GMaiForums.

Finally, there are many who have emailed me asking about how they can contribute to this project.  If you'd like, you can use the Paypal 'make a donation' link under the menu. You can also help by spreading the word to your friends and on the internet forms you visit.  A simple link to this page is greatly appreciated.  You should also keep an eye out for the ads on the left side of these pages and visit the sponsors that are of interest to you.