Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
America Online

Transferring Mail from AOL? 102

Posted by Cliff from the preserving-important-content dept.
Bazooka Joel asks: "My father has been a long time user of AOL. He subscribed to AOL's dialup service about 5 years ago and created his first email account with their services. We now have cable internet from a local company, but he still pays $15 a month just to access his email. I have tried to get him to switch to Gmail, but he is stubborn. He finally relented and said that if I could forward all of his old mail (thousands of messages) and import his contact list into Gmail, he would cancel his AOL subscription. After searching the 'net, I found a way to import his contacts. However, I cannot find a program that will forward all of his old mail. Can anybody lend me a hand?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Transferring Mail from AOL? More

Transferring Mail from AOL?

Comments Filter:

  • Read Slashdot (Score:3, Funny)

    by ike6116 ( 602143 ) * on Thursday July 28, 2005 @02:32PM (#13188303) Homepage Journal
    Tell your dad to get hip and start IMing, e-mail is SOOOOO out these days.
    • The dad is probably old and we all know email is for old people.
      • Email is for old people, because old people are willing to communicate with more than 4 characters of text.

        My experience with IM, chat, etc, is that most people type really, really slowly and can't think of anything interesting to say in real time.

        • 'sup?

          Still, cut them some slack. My experience has been that a lot of people who start with one-word statements will open up when they get comfortable. If you have any geek/shyness heritage at all, you can probably dig back into the cobwebby depths of your old person's memory and remember what this was like. :')

          (Just so you know I'm just giving you a hard time about the old person thing, I'm an Ancient One myself - I remember the days when a 2mhz 6502 processor was pretty cool.)

    • Re:Read Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)

      by nocomment ( 239368 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @03:43PM (#13189050) Homepage Journal
      I'd actually recomend his dad downgrade his AOL service to the $5/mo service so he can still use his AOL.

      I hope the OP knows that if anything breaks with the new setup he's forcing onto his Dad, it's going to be his fault. Instead I'd recomend he save his Dad some money.

      • Re:Read Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ChadN ( 21033 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @03:56PM (#13189186)
        I agree. After years of helping out my family members and friends with their computers, I've learned that "no good deed goes unpunished".

        If there is a way to change to a cheaper AOL service, tell your Dad about it. But think *3* times before taking on the responsibility of changing his email patterns (and protecting his data); unless your Dad is pleading with you for the change, it is almost never worth it to get involved. The effort will not be appreciated nearly as much as you hope, and there will be bad feelings if things don't go absolutely 100% correctly.

        Good luck.

        • MOD PARENT UP (Score:1, Offtopic)

          by WindBourne ( 631190 )
          I have been asked several times to convert ppl over to Linux. What they really wanted was for me to re-install a stolen version of Windows on their systems. Well, great. It is stolen for starters, and secondly, I have not done windows in over a decade (until just 6 months ago).

          So help them move to Linux. Every thing is cool. Runs, no issues. Right? Wrong. Pretty soon they want to install new apps. One of them allows you to pay the site $15.00 and you get all the music that you want for free. Wellcome to sc
      • Theres an entirely different reason for switching from AOL. They now require all email senders to be listed with them as HAM senders. They asked us to ask our ISP to list all their IP addresses as HAM addresses, even though we alone handle our mailservers.

        So we currently cannot send emails to AOL. Their demands are rediculous for the previlege of being able to send emails to AOL members. I'd rather tell all our users AOL doesnt take our emails.

        The OP should get his father off AOL simply so he could receive
        • $5/month is a fair price for a safe harbor email and dial-up account. I've had my AOL account for 10+ years and while I rarely if ever use it (it's not even installed on my machine), it has come in handy a couple times when I was in some distant place (Tokyo, Prague, Iosco County, MI) with a phone line and no easy-to-locate internet cafes. Wifi makes this less of an issue, but you never know when you're going to end up someplace (like Oscoda, Michigan) where there is simply no public wifi to be found within

  • Leave him with a POP client (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Vaevictis666 ( 680137 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @02:35PM (#13188341)
    Leave him with his windows client as is, and just get it to check the gmail account from now on. All his existing email will be stored locally, and in a few years when he decides that he really doesn't need them any more, the new stuff will all be synched between his desktop and gmail on the web, if he decides he wants to switch to a webapp for his email.
    • Wow, great answer - the guy wants to migrate existing email out from AOL, and your solution is to ignore the problem and hope it goes away "in a few years". Brilliant.

      Although, at first I misread your header and thought you advised leaving the old guy with a POOP client. At his age, that's probably already a problem...

  • AOL Leave (Score:5, Informative)

    by rogueuk ( 245470 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @02:37PM (#13188367) Homepage
    A quick google turned this up:
    http://aoleave.com/ [aoleave.com]

    It looks to be exactly what you are looking for, but it seems to be a little out of date so it may not necessarily work.
    • that won't work for current editions of AOL. When I looked at all the tools out there that do this sort of thing, none supported the latest version. And none that were on track to support it were all that pragmatic (you would have to save each email individually). Easier to just setup IMAP in thunderbird/outlook.
  • Doesn't AOL provide IMAP access to their mailboxes?

    If so, you may be able to use a mail client (Thunderbird, maybe?) for proxy between the IMAP link to AOL and the POP link to Gmail.

    The only caveat is that Gmail may not upload those messages once you drop them into the inbox on your mail client.

  • IMAP (Score:5, Informative)

    by SeeTheLight ( 902400 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @02:38PM (#13188374)
    You could use IMAP to grab the mail off of AOL's servers in any IMAP-capable email client, according to their site [aol.com].
  • ...we had to forward our email one by one!

  • Netscape (Score:5, Informative)

    by Scaba ( 183684 ) <joe@joefranDEBIANcia.com minus distro> on Thursday July 28, 2005 @02:38PM (#13188386)

    Netscape allows you to get your AOL mail via IMAP (at least it used to). You could download it that way, and then use one of the various utilities out there to forward your mail to Gmail (Google for them). Some do a simple forward and everything looks like it came from you, and others I think are a bit smarter about it (I think they use redirect instead of forward).

    • Re:Netscape (Score:5, Informative)

      by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @02:57PM (#13188596) Homepage
      First, get your mail into outlook/thunderbird using AOL's IMAP Server [aol.com].

      Then use your email program's Forward/Redirect (if it has it) function to forward it to your gmail/current account.

      If you want to spend $20, TrueSwitch [trueswitch.com] will automatically do this all for you AND transfer your address book and forward your mail for a month and notify all of your contacts of your address change. This service is free for many ISPs (AT&T, SBC, Yahoo, and MSN come to mind) which is how I know about it...
      • True Switch is defintly his best option.

        It converts it all.

        My advice. Sign up for an MSN account. (free for 30 or 90 days if you ask).

        Use true switch to import all your email etc. to MSN. Install MSN Explorer to a box and convert your imported email and address book to Outlook Express.

        Your father now has his contact list available for gmail and all his email archived on his box.
  • You can use any POP client to download the email from AOL. That's simple.

    But uploading is the problem. Neither Gmail nor Yahoo Mail let you upload messages to their server.

  • Can anybody lend me a hand?

    Sure, if you don't mind my RFID tag. [/rimshot]

  • IMAP (Score:5, Informative)

    by jm92956n ( 758515 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @02:44PM (#13188450) Journal
    My suggestion: hire a team of trained monkeys to print out the existing e-mails and manually type them back into gmail.

    Or, if that doesn't sound appealing, here's a better idea:

    AOL Mail supports IMAP. Gmail supports POP3. Download Mozilla Thunderbird (or some other e-mail client) and set up two accounts for it (the gmail and AOL). The one application will then allow him to receive all his old AOL e-mails and any new e-mail that may be sent to his new gmail account.

    Don't cancel the AOL account right away. Have him start by sending all new emails from gmail, even if they are received by AOL. Within two or three months, all his contacts should be sending mail to the new address.

    For reference, the AOL Incoming Mail Server (IMAP) is imap.aol.com (port 143). By default, POP3 is not enabled in gmail. To turn it on, click "settings" from the main in-box page and then "forwarding and POP"

    • This is the only sane, succinct answer I have read yet.

      Congratulations, 758515, you're a star!

      Oh, and someone for the love of god please moderate parent up.
    • It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times!
      But seriously, this is the simplest solution possible yes? I don't understand the need to ask slashdot...

  • fetchmail + gmail loader ? (Score:3, Informative)

    by grattwood ( 533456 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @02:44PM (#13188455) Homepage
    Can you download the email from AOL, or is it webmail only? I would look at a combination of fetchmail http://www.catb.org/~esr/fetchmail/ [catb.org] to get the mail and gmail loader http://www.marklyon.org/gmail/ [marklyon.org] to load it to gmail.

    Even if the AOL email is webmail only, someone may have a tool to get the email and put it into mbox format. A quick google shows that web2pop http://www.jmasoftware.com/english/ [jmasoftware.com] might be helpful.

    What ever way you go, it'll probably be held together with spit and duct tape, but it's only a one time thing.

    Good luck.
  • I seem to recall AOL offering a standalone email client based on Thunderbird. If not, I know I've seen people using Thunderbird to access their AOL email. I'd recommend using that (or any standalone email client for that matter) and GMail Loader [marklyon.org] to import the mail into GMail. That's how I transitioned email from all of my old accounts into GMail.

  • Outsource it! (Score:4, Funny)

    by cjsnell ( 5825 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @02:47PM (#13188478) Journal

    Outsource it, baby! I'm pretty sure that there are companies in India or Bangladesh which would forward e-mail to your father's Gmail account, one e-mail at a time!
  • clicky clicky [mozilla.org]

    It might be a bit twisted, but it might also get the job done simply...
  • You want all of his old mail put into his gmail account so that he can cancel AOL; not continue to allow him to access AOL mail from the regular net instead of the client which most likely would require keeping AOL access (even "AOL Over Broadband" which is such a miserable ripoff).

    The trick is going to be parsing the messages he has on his computer and mailing them into his gmail account.

    Does he have an ISP email account? Probably the simplest thing to do would be set up a script that takes the messages
  • There is (or at least, was) a $3/month AOL plan that only gave access to webmail. I don't see it advertised anywhere, so you may have to call them to find out if it's still offered. You'd probably have to threaten to cancel to get them to admit it exists.
  • The real problem which I encountered many years ago is that the AOL client software uses a proprietary format and they are, naturally, not eager to help you export your mail.

    Fortunately, others [connectedsw.com] have solved this problem. Unfortunately it only exports to Outlook formats but then you can use a different [aid4mail.com] program to convert to mbox or a variety of other formats and from there you could probably send it to Google. (These programs were discovered through an arduous 10 seconds of Googling.)

    But why not import it all

  • Semi-tangential comment (Score:3, Insightful)

    by secolactico ( 519805 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @03:01PM (#13188639) Journal
    I know I'm not answering your question, but before commiting your dad's thousands of messages, remember that Gmail is still in beta. I still get messages like "can't access your mailbox. cross your fingers and try again later" or something to that effect.

    Gmail is very convenient, but I'd keep a local copy or backup copy of the messages somewhere just to be safe.

    • I know I'm not answering your question, but before commiting your dad's thousands of messages, remember that Gmail is still in beta. I still get messages like "can't access your mailbox. cross your fingers and try again later" or something to that effect.


      As far as I am concerned AOL has been in beta all these years. Google will get it right... question is - will AOL EVER get their head out of their ass?
    • Good point. Aside from the flakiness issues you describe, GMail is not something you can recommend to the non-geek. They're totally rethinking the email concept with this project. Not a bad thing to do, but guaranteed to confuse a lot of people.

      Fortunately, there are a lot of free email providers out there. Or if you don't like having ads in your messages, you can sign up for a paid account that costs $20 a year or thereabouts. Which is a lot cheaper than keeping your AOL account open just to get email. S

      • "...remember that Gmail is still in beta. I still get messages like "can't access your mailbox. cross your fingers and try again later" or something to that effect."

        I've never seen this message. Nor has any of the 20 friends and coworkers I asked.

        "GMail is not something you can recommend to the non-geek. They're totally rethinking the email concept with this project. Not a bad thing to do, but guaranteed to confuse a lot of people."

        Huh? GMail is typical web-based email. The only difference I've not

        • Do your other e-mail services do "conversation" or "archive" or labels instead of folders? No. Anything different confuses people, these are different. That's the gp's point.
          • Do your other e-mail services do "conversation" or "archive" or labels instead of folders?

            Yes. My yahoo web e-mail has labels and one of them is "archive." I don't recall if it's a default or if I created it, but it's there.

            Anything different confuses people, these are different.

            Neither myself or the dozen+ plus people I've invited to gmail are overly technical by any means. Nobody was confused.

  • A solution (Score:5, Informative)

    by aakin ( 126692 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @03:10PM (#13188707)
    Using any box with mutt running on it:

    - mutt imaps://user@imap.aol.com
    - tag everything using "t"
    - hit "b" (bounce all tag messages to:)
              username@gmail.com

    And you're done.

    I haven't done this with AOL, per say, but I did it with a few other imap mailboxes I had to transfer everything to gmail.
  • Have you considered switching him to AIM Mail instead? It's free and probably closer to the AOL experience.
  • When I got married I had to do this with my wifes AOL email. If you forward too many emails in a short period of time AOL will assume your a spammer and automatically freeze your accounts e-mail privilages. Additionally, some people refered to using a mail client and IMAP, but the AOL client stores the email locally in a propritary format. A previous post did mention "aoleave" which has (or points to) a utility to convert the mailbox file. And another post refered to a gmail uploader.

  • imap.aol.com is available to all AOL screen names (Score:3, Informative)

    by Fiery ( 21015 ) * <rsoderberg@gmail.com> on Thursday July 28, 2005 @05:09PM (#13189916) Homepage
    http://members.aol.com/adamkb/aol/mailfaq/imap/ [aol.com]

    You can download new messages, old messages, saved messages, etc. Combined with an IMAP-aware utility that can download all mail from an account (imapsync, fetchmail, whatever) you're set.

  • Google GMail Loader (Score:2, Informative)

    by ajayg ( 122305 )
    I'm not sure how AOL works, but you can give Mark Lyon's handy little application [marklyon.org] a try to forward the old mail to a gmail account. You could download your AOL emails to some local Unix style mailbox and use the app after. There is IMAP support planned, but it's not implemented yet as far as I know. Hope that helps. If not, mod me down!
  • While this is not a direct answer to the request, it might be helpful in times of distress:

    If you encounter a disrupted organizer (AOLs local storage), you will be able to rescue at most of the message bodies (no pun intended) with
    http://wyae.de/software/aolexport/ [wyae.de]

    This will give you only text files containing one (or a few) messages a time - but better than nothing. It won't help you repairing anything nor rescue contacts nor favourites. So just make sure to have a backup copy of your organizer before updat
  • Tell him it might not be easy now, but were you to be in Soviet Russia, YOUR old e-mail would come looking for YOU!
  • Well, I've used to be an AOL user, (this is how it was then) and some people seem to be looking at this the wrong way. Not all of your mail is stored on AOLs server. Your personal filing cabinet actually sits on your computers hard drive. When you see mail in your inbox or sent or whatever, it will normally only stay there for a week and then it is downloaded to your computers hard drive, in the form of your personal filing cabinet. Using an IMAP client would allow you to download the messages which are sti

  • imap (Score:2)

    by pyros ( 61399 )
    You can use an IMAP client to access your AOL account. If he has anything in his Personal Filing Cabinet (proprietary format for mail saved to the computer), he would have to move it back to the AOL server. From the IMAP client, you could save it locally. I'm not sure about how to get it into gmail from there, but it will at least be out of AOL and stored in a more portable format. Perhaps the GMail wizards are working on an "import your pst/mbox file" feature. One can dream ...
  • I actually am working on this with my family, but after 10 years of AOL, it's pretty ingrained (particularly my Mom who won't get a new anything until what's she's using breaks), so I had to do it in phases (for me, it was about a month between phases, I thought it would be longer).

    My first target was my brother, who reads /. ('nuff said). His worry was everyone who emails him at AOL and I told him just to plan on a two year transition to get everyone to his new account. It took us each like a month to
  • I used this technique to bounce my imap mail to gmail. Since AOL supports IMAP protocol, set up Pine to access the IMAP server at AOL, set up SMTP access and then "bounce" your mail over to gmail. Instructions are at:
    http://www.aaltonen.us/archive/2004/04/26/tip-batc h-forward-email/ [aaltonen.us]

    Two notes:
    1. Gmail will preserve the dates on the messages, but will display the date that the message was received by gmail servers. When you click the message the correct date will show.
    2. If you overload a server between yo
  • What OS does he use? Mac OS perchance?

    Back in the Macintosh System 7, Mac OS 7.5 - 8.6 days I used to use a program called Claris Emailer. It was originally written by Fog City Software and later bought by Claris/Apple. It was a great POP email client but could also fetch mail from AOL.

    The creators of Claris Emailer updated it with version 2.0, then joined the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit to create the Mac versions of Outlook and Outlook Express, and later, Entourage.

    Perhaps that is a potential email d
  • Forwarding all your mail to Gmail via Gmail's own SMTP servers is probably the most reliable method of transferring his mail across.

    Server: smtp.gmail.com
    Port: 465 or 587
    Username: yourgooglemailname@gmail.com
    Password: yourpassword
    Use Authentication: Yes
    Use STARTTLS: Yes (some clients call this SSL)

Slashdot Top Deals

"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne

Close