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.

Peter Principle Surpassed

Peter Principle

(PEET-uhr PRIN-suh-pal)

noun

The theory that an employee within an organization will advance to his or her level of incompetence and remain there.

I can never fault someone for not knowing something. There are innumerable topics about which I know absolutely nothing. In today's world, it is impossible to know everything about your own field, especially when that field is as broad and wide-ranging as technology. There is, however, a basic level of competence that I think anyone involved in technology should possess.

Today, I witnessed a person who had blown the Peter Principle out of the water.
For reasons which will quickly become clear, I don't want to go into much detail at all about the particular clients I work with. Suffice it to say that these companies are some of the largest in the world in their respective industries, and these industries are regulated to such a degree that something as simple as changing your password requires a half an hour on the telephone with their operations managers. The testing requirements for simple applications fill binders that would make the American Tax Code look like a garage sale flier.

For the most part, the people that I deal with in these companies are some of the brightest people I've ever dealt with. Due to the nature of our work, I don't deal with everyday system operators. I deal with IT Managers and CTO-level personnel. That is why it is so jarring to encounter someone who seems to have absolutely no technical expertise at all.

I don't want to rant about the specific employee that I had to deal with today, but suffice it to say he obviously knows very little about technology. He wanted me to test a particular piece of software for him, but having much more important and pressing matters to attend to, I chose instead to simply provide him the five-word command that he could use to test the application himself. All he had to do was copy the command from my email, paste it into his emulator screen, and press Enter.

That proved to be too complicated for him to handle.

I spent the next two hours running this command while he fiddled with settings. I finally got fed up to the point that I just told him to let me take care of everything and I would call him. An hour later, I had un-done all of his settings shenanigans and had the software working.

What I would like to discuss is not whether I should have helped him. We are contracted to that company to provide support for these situations, so it was well within his right to expect that I would help him.

The problem lies in the wisdom of having such a person on your staff. Here is someone who was incapable of copying five words of text, pasting them into another screen and pressing Enter. Here is someone who told me that he had configured this particular piece of software exactly the same as similar package from the same company. The two packages use identical settings files and identical settings screens. When I looked at the settings, not only did he not have half the settings populated, several of the ones he had managed to populate were populated incorrectly!

What is this person costing you? Let's just say that he makes $60,000 per year. That's $30 per hour. Let's also consider the distinct possibility that he spent a good hour trying to get this software set up prior to calling me. Add that hour to the two hours he was on the phone with me, and you're looking at $90 worth of his time that was spent accomplishing a task that should have taken five minutes.

Now let's consider the cost of having me fix his problem. We charge $150 per hour. I spent three hours handholding and reconfiguring. That's another $450 on top of the $90 that they paid this employee. The total cost of what should have been a five-minute configuration? $540.

This is a clear case of an employee that is costing them money. And the baffling part is that he has risen to such a high level amongst others who so completely outshine him in ability that it is almost sad. It baffles me that they have kept this employee on for the last fifteen years, and he hasn't learned how to cut and paste. It is beyond my comprehension that this person has been able to keep a very technical position in spite of his complete lack of technical ability.

The point is that you have to look at your organization and make sure that you have people who aren't costing you money. If you have hired someone for a technical position, they should be able to demonstrate a certain level of technical skill. As the position becomes more and more critical, the greater the level of expertise this person needs to show. Why some companies keep people like this where they are is a mystery to me.

They must know of this employee's limitations. It is impossible for him to have been there for fifteen years without getting labeled as the moron. I just wonder what justification they have for paying what is very likely a considerable salary to someone who is contributing very little except hassle to their goals.

But who knows -- maybe the guy just makes really good cookies for the office every Friday.