Gmail Overload

2009.02.11 in personal

A few years back, I got the idea that I should archive my email to disk every few years; mostly because Apple Mail used to be sluggish with lots of mail. I suppose this might have been a result of Trillian not having much memory, or Mail just being crappy at the time (noo!), but whatever it was, it wasn't Gmail's fault!

A few days ago, Robb was moving his mail from RPI's webmail to his Gmail, happily reorganizing, reading old emails, and reminiscing, and I remembered the archives sitting on Jayne (and on CD, somewhere...). I copied them down, and poked around for a way to try to move them back into my live Gmail account.

It turns out Mail can't import its own files... you need to convert them first. Anyway, after a long conversion session, I spent the better part of the last few days slowly copying tens of thousands of emails back up to Gmail.

Now, I have a mess... a single folder, with more than 52,000 emails in it; everything from 2004 on to now. What's really amazing is instantaneous search both in Mail and in the Gmail web interface... I'm impressed that everything is holding together!




Anyway — if you wanted to know how much mail Mail can handle, it's well over 52,000, at least on a 2007 MBP...