Transfer your email from Thunderbird to Outlook 2013 using GMail in 10 easy(ish) steps.

For the last 12 years or so I have been using Mozilla's Thunderbird application as my email reader. I was also using either OpenOffice or LibreOffice as my office suite. My boss finally got a subscription to the Microsoft Developer's network, meaning that we had access to multiple licenses for Office 2013, which includes Outlook 2013. Since some of the documents I must work with don't format correctly if they are opened in OpenOffice or LibreOffice, I decided to install Office 2013. Coinciding with that, I had a motherboard failure in my work laptop and was presented with a new one. I figured it was as good a time as any to convert to Outlook 2013, since I had been experiencing random freezes with Thunderbird.

Imagine my shock to find that Microsoft had made it all but impossible to import mail from any other mail program -- even Outlook Express. (That right there, I say that right there, is what we call sarcasm, son.)

I did find some commercial applications that claimed to be able to facilitate the conversion, but I just couldn't bring myself to pay $50 for something I'm going to use for less than an hour, ever. So I did what all good geeks do - I saved that $50 by spending $500 worth of my time looking for a free solution.

I didn't find one.

Not to be deterred, I did some thinking. And I came up with a way to move my email over, for free. I would just use GMail.

Here's how it goes:

Step 1: Get a throwaway GMail address.

Step 2: Make sure that your new GMail account has IMAP enabled. Go here and follow the prompts.

Step 3: Configure your GMail account in Thunderbird. You can find those instructions Here. There is also a good discussion of the relationship between Thunderbird folders and GMail Labels.

Step 4: For each folder of archived mail you have in your main Thunderbird account, create an identical folder in the GMail account in Thunderbird.

Step 5: Open each main Thunderbird folder and copy all emails to the corresponding folder in the GMail account. Since the GMail account is set up to use IMAP, when you copy those emails in they get mirrored up to your GMail account. It even preserves the original send date. Be sure the synchronization is complete before proceeding to Step 6.

Step 6: Configure your GMail account in Outlook 2013 and do a send/receive to download all of your email from GMail.

Step 7: Configure your main email account in Outlook 2013 and create your folders.

Step 8: Copy over the messages from your GMail account folders to your main email folders in Outlook. 

Step 9: If you wish, you may remove your GMail account from Outlook and delete everything from your GMail account.

Step 10: Pour yourself a beer, buddy. You're done. For free.

UN Tries to Take Over the Internet

There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there's just millions of voices and people want to be heard.

--Rupert Murdoch

According to an eWeek article, the United Nations is planning to try to wrestle control of the internet from the United States. What makes this scary is that it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if the UN manages to take control of the internet that it won't be long before they will be regulating what can be posted. Any organization that cozys up to China and puts countries like Lybia on a "Human Rights Council" can't be trusted with something as important as the internet. The UN's own Declaration of "Human Rights" states that freedom of speech is guaranteed...unless that speech interferes with the UN's goals. Think about that for a moment.

To its credit, the US Government is planning to fight the takeover attempt. The US invented the internet, and the rest of the world is hitching it's wagon to the invention of the US Military. If they get especially belligerent about it, I would fully support withdrawing completely to within the US with regard to the internet. Just make it work for the US, and let the rest of the world figure out their own system. In other words, take our ball and go home. We'll see how long the rest of the world will last without being propped up by the US.

Million Dollar Homepage

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

-Oscar Wilde

There was an item that was discussed on TWIT for October 2, 2005 about the Million Dollar Homepage. It seems that some guy put up a page that has one million "pixels". Advertisers (or just ordinary folks) can purchase pixels for a buck a pixel. So if you wanted to post a 10x10 pixel ad, it would cost you $100.

Apparently, the guy is doing this to pay for college, and I've got to say that it's a pretty ingenious idea. It seems to be working, as they said he had made about $250,000 (and had his PayPal account frozen, as well). What do you think the chances are that clones of this site are going to start popping up like crazy?