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gExodus 0.2 - some new features for Gmail mbox import tool
I've updated gExodus (previous version 0.1) with 2 new features (straight from the changelog):
- Added ability to set a label to prefix to the Subject of forwarded emails.
- Added "Pause/Continue" feature.The "label" idea was suggested by Rory Parle (great thinking!), and it should be particularly useful for identifying which imported email messages came from which mbox. For example, if you set a label of "[yahoo-personal]" when importing your Yahoo personal email account into Gmail with gExodus, each of the emails will have "[yahoo-personal]" prefixed to their subject field. This means that an email that had the subject of "Hey dude, I heard Futurama's coming back!" becomes "[yahoo-personal] Hey dude, I heard Futurama's coming back!". It annoyed me that the imported mails cluttered up my Gmail inbox and I don’t know which ones are imported, and which are “live” emails that I’ve just received. This also now allows me to setup a filter to filter all imported mail to be tagged with a particular label.
The "Pause/continue" feature allows you to pause the importing of messages midway through an import. Useful in situations where you have a large mailbox with lots of messages. It should rightly work even after you've disconnected (and reconnected) your Internet connection.
Still having several issues with multithreading, so you'll notice 1 last email being imported after you pause or abort gExodus. This is because if the email forwarding thread is paused (or killed) while it is sending out an email, it will follow through with it before actually pausing (or dying). It's not a particularly catastrophic issue, though far from acceptable.
Feedback and suggestions welcome as always. This is what's on my TODO list:
- Pre-select where the mbox file is most likely to reside on a harddisk
- Delay field (for specifying the delay between sending one message and the next)
- Interactive importing ("Yes/No/Yes to all")
- Importing of maildir format
- Recurse subdirectories and import all the mailboxes in each directory -
Weblog categorized using Dewey Decimal System
Lisa Williams of Learning The Lessons of Nixon has her weblog entries categorized using the Dewey Decimal System! Nice!
I'd do the same too, only I think most of my categories would belong under the big umbrellas of Technology and Computers.
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Gmail invite for loyal reader
Update: I've invited Anthony Eden - Anthony used to offer FreeRoller (a site that offers free blog hosting) for free, but has since moved on and FreeRoller is now JRoller (still free). I used to have a FreeRoller account myself.
Note: If you haven't been a reader for awhile, I'll know, so don't try and fake it.
I'm giving out 1 Gmail invite to a reader who has been with me for awhile. If you could show yourselves, by commenting and telling me a bit about yourself, I'll send you an invite. No, I'm not whoring out my invites (at least I don't think so) - I just thought this would help me to get to know my readers a bit better. redemption in a blog has been steadily growing with about 2,000 visits a day, but I'm not seeing many of my readers commenting. I sometimes wonder if anybody actually reads what I write or there's some bot out there periodically requesting my webpages at an approximately linearly increasing rate.
I'm not giving it out based on who posts first, but rather genuine readers (I'd have make educated guesses, unless I know of you from the "before time").
Initially I'd wanted to give out 2 invites, but that has quickly whittled away to just 1. Oh well, I'll get more invites soon I guess.
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The secret behind getting more Gmail invites
Update: Well, it seems I was wrong about this. Google seems to give out invites quite randomly. Read the comments for more info.
OK so it'd no longer be a secret now that I've let it out into the wild. Anyway, the hypothesis goes somewhat like this: the number of Gmail invites you get (to send out) is positively correlated to your usage of Gmail. "Usage of Gmail" is hard to define, but I reckon it'd include the number of emails you send/receive, and possibly the amount of storage you use (out of the 1GB).
Why do I say so? Um, if you've been following my inane writings on this weblog, you'd probably noticed gExodus, a Python hack job that I churned out yesterday that imports emails (in mbox format) into Gmail. It does this by forwarding your existing mbox - i.e. it parses the mbox file and sends each email via SMTP to your Gmail account. This registers as received mail in your Gmail account.
In my testing of gExodus, I probably forwarded around a thousand emails. I just logged into my Gmail account and saw the red "Invite a friend to join Gmail!" link...
And I had 6 invitations (I'm left with 4 now). People don't normally get 6 invites in 6 days' time. But 1000+ (received) emails in 1 day, 6 invites the next - all that's left is to connect the dots.
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gExodus - a graphical Gmail import tool
Update: gExodus 0.2 is out.
When I saw (and used) Mark Lyon's Mbox & Maildir to Gmail Loader (GML) (I wrote about it), I was inspired to write a GUI version of it (I didn't copy Mark's code, just in case, though it works on the same basis). gExodus is what came out at the end of half a day's work.
gExodus allows you to import your emails (in mbox format) into your Gmail account. The mbox format is the classic Unix-style mailbox format, and is used by Mozilla Mail/News, Mozilla Thunderbird, qmail, and many other Unix email applications. There currently isn't support for qmail's maildir format, which is a much better format in terms of reliability and efficiency (because there isn't a need to lock a single file, as it is for the mbox format). There doesn't seem to be any Windows email application that supports maildir, so I've left it out. Someone has also posted a feature request for maildir support in Mail/News (and consequently Mozilla Thunderbird), so vote for the bug! I'll add support for for maildir and possibly the MH mailbox formats if someone requests for it.
Users of email clients which don't use the mbox format (such as Outlook Express and Outlook) can convert their emails into the mbox format by importing them into Mozilla Mail/News or Mozilla Thunderbird. I'll add support for Outlook Express (.DBX) and Outlook (.PST) email formats in the near future (there are many converters already available, in fact).
gExodus is written in Python, and uses PythonCard (which is based on wxPython toolkit). PythonCard is a simpler wxPython, and is amazingly simple to use. With a WYSIWYG resource editor which allows you to place widgets and edit their properties, as well as very simple syntax rules and event handling concepts, PythonCard is Visual Studio with a better grounded language (Python). Granted, there are some inadequacies, one of the most glaring being the lack of a formal tab order (I got around that by moving widgets to the front - the nearer one is to the front, the higher it's tab order). Still, I'm glad I picked PythonCard for my graphical toolkit - I haven't used any before and was considering my options at this Python GUI toolkit "comparison" page.
gExodus is a standalone program - Gordon McMillan's Installer was used to convert the Python scripts into executable form. The article Building 'standalone' PythonCard Applications came in very handy, especially when I didn't manage to get py2exe to work (the executable didn't work properly). The documentation for using McMillan's Installer with PythonCard didn't seem to work also. Due to dependencies on the wxPython and PythonCard libraries, the resulting executable package is pretty hefty (approx. 4MB) - 2.4MB of that is a wxPython DLL.
The source code is currently unreleased (I'll put it out in the near future). Listed below are the binaries.
Update: gExodus 0.2 is out. You may want to get that instead of version 0.1 below.
Download gExodus:
Feedback is greatly appreciated. I haven't really tested it on other machines (just my own Pentium 4 desktop running Windows XP), so bugs are expected (please let me know of them).
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