Geek mail migrating to Google Hosted Email

My last email verbatim:

IMAP users:
You typically have folders. Your email is generally still stored online and will probably have a local copy as well.

Much like our last migration, if you want to bring your email with you you are going to have to add Google’s IMAP server (after turning it on) to your local mail client. You will then have to copy email from your sent folders to Google’s sent folder, inbox to inbox, other folders to inbox (google doesn’t have multiple folders, it has Labels (sort of like a folder, you’ll get it when you get in there and start messing around)). This is sort of a slow process that you may want to get on now.

I haven’t done my contacts yet, but it seems that you have to find a way to export your contacts from your mail client to a CSV file and then attempt to import it into Google Mail.

POP Users:
Typically you download all your mail to your local desktop. (there are leave mail on server options, but most people don’t turn this on)

If you are a POP user and do leave your mail on server, migration will be pretty easy for you, under the options are ways to sync other POP accounts. Simply add the information and Google will download it all for you (why they can’t do this for IMAP is beyond me, it’s a pay for feature of Google Apps to the tune of 50$ a person).
If you have your mail on your local machine, well…. I’m not sure how you are going to get your email into Google. I’m sort of hoping that no one here still using POP without leaving mail on server.

That being said, if you are one of these POP people that have it all on your local machine, you are probably one of those people that want to continue using your local mail client. In this case you will have an easy migration.

Basically when we will flip the switch so to speak, you will add the new Google account to your email client and start downloading mail from Google to your local machine, just like you did for Dreamhost.

So that being said, I haven’t offered up a lot of instruction in there. Mostly hoping I won’t have to, but I know I care about my crazy back years of email, and am slowly copying them up via IMAP, so I imagine some of you are doing the same. This link may be of some help to you:

Another person’s migration.

(don’t pay for stuff though, there should be a way to work around most things cept maybe all your mail locally, even that I think is somewhat fixable)

For IMAP’ers here’s what I’ve done:

Log into http://gmail.rezgeek.com.
In the top right is Settings, click it.
Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
Enable IMAP.
There is a link below for instructions on how to add it to your client.

I strongly suggest trying to set the Account Name to like GMAIL or something unique from your email address so things aren’t as confusing. This statement alone is a bit confusing, atleast in Thunderbird the account name defaults to your email address, so just tread carefully.

After this you should see a separate Inbox, Sent Mail, Archives, Trash whatever folders for your GMAIL account, you will want to select your old email and start migrating it into GMAIL. It’s kind of slow.

I am going to, in the next few days, set up everyone’s email so that it forwards to your GMAIL account box too. Again this will not change anything for you now, you will just have email going to two places, your current box at Dreamhost and your GMAIL box.

I’d love to hold everyone’s hand through this, cause I know I just put you all through a service change like 3 or 4 months ago, but lately I’ve been retardedly busy, so I will do my best to help anyone that needs help but make no promises 🙂

ian

Free once more…

The first time I left, I think I swore I wouldn’t go back. For years I searched for something with the same level of engagement. I tried dozens of others, only to get a few hours in and bored. For whatever reason at some point I made a conscious decision to stop trying to replace it, and just go back…

Having gone back a second time, and gone deeper than I had the first time, made it to the pinnacle, hit a plateau, and eventually achieve my target and then completely lose interest. A magnificently made game, one that consistently rewards time spent, provides you with others with the same interests, on top of a great interface that is to some a great endevour to build on it’s own… Min/Maxing, tweaking, alts…. sigh….

Regret, not really… DK with entire T9 tank set, T10 DPS set, current pvp high end armor and his 310 mount from a year of fucking holidays achievement… Shammy with T10 Enhance, Resto gear, machining top pvp armor… Professions maxed, alts… 76, 73, 60, 43, 43….

The crowd I ran with thinned before I did, from 10-12 to 4… I didn’t feel like making new friends, wanted no more of the raiding culture. Had the expansion come sooner it may have kept a bit of a grip on me, pvp was to be the new mountain to climb, having conquered the PvE game and finally killed the LK.

If you ever read any of the books, or have played the game, you know they write a good story. From day one of WoW back in whatever year it was (been almost 6 now isn’t it), it was all because of the LK, he was the driving narrative of the game, and was of Warcraft 3, which WoW proceeds… I honestly wonder how bad for business it will be for Blizz having let people kill that final boss… without digressing much further to the game, I for one have zero interest in Deathmaw or really much of the new story. Killing the king is as close to the end of WoW one could look for.

I stopped to write this cause in the course of cleaning up my computer, I have come across txt files all over the place, loot lists, gear lists, min / max crap… I got bookmarks, rss feeds, twitter follows, slowly being removed.

Thanks again for the ride WoW, wife certainly didn’t appreciate it, you caused some issues (well i caused some issues) 🙂 But I still have to say you are thoroughly engaging, I hate ya for it now, but was an interesting ride…

oddrez

Mail fixes

If you are an IPhone user with move to trash issues you will have to do this:

  • Goto Settings/Preferences
  • Choose email account info
  • Advanced
  • Deleted Email
  • Check settings for Trash.
  • You will want to either tap the Trash on phone, or Trash on Server depending on where you want your Trash stored (not that it should matter as you should be deleting your trash right?).

OLD IMAP ACCOUNTS (aka where the hell did my folders and my email go):

  • This will be different for each email client
  • You will need to create LOCAL FOLDERS
  • Switch your account settings to your old username/pass and connect via IMAP to old.rezgeek.com
  • I’ve found folders may take a bit to come up, or you may have to close and reopen your mail client to get them to show up.
  • At worse, you may have to right click on your folder and look for a Subscribe setting. You may have to subscribe to a folder to get it to show up in your program.
  • Once you have them showing, you will want to copy them to your local folders. Make sure you pay attention to syncing your Sent mail folder too, if you client is like Thunderbird it may not be immediately obvious what is online and what is not.
  • Once you have sync’d to your local folders, you will probably want to go through atleast email with attachments and delete some of the old crap you don’t want any more. YOU MAY EVEN WANT TO DO THIS BEFORE SYNC’ING TO YOUR COMPUTER! Make sure to empty your trash after you’ve done this house cleaning.
  • Email by and large is small, except for attachments, so pulling your email from old geek will be fast if it’s just email, slow if there is alot of attachments.
  • Once you’ve got what you need locally, change your settings back to dreamhost. Then copy the folders back into dreamhost. Again, quick if there are no attachments, slow otherwise, so I do caution you to delete as much of your old attachments as possible, or be willing to wait.

Drop me a line if something else doesn’t seem to be working.

ian

Email…

It’s always all about the email right… Sorry I know for some of you shit seems pretty fucked up (to put it lightly)…

I have not sorted my mail out yet, so I do not have a bunch of suggestions for you guys yet (never helps that my work vpn has my old dns information cached).

For you pop users, you are okay, everything seems fine to you. For us IMAP users, well lets just say all your folders and email is still on the old rezgeek.com.

As I alluded to below, you can pull all your email down from my server by making a new account and set the IMAP server as old.rezgeek.com, using your old account name and password (hopefully u remember that). Then you will need to check the settings of your email client and sync them to your local hard drive.

I don’t really have specific help for that because it will really differ per email client, but I’ll see if I can’t post what I do in Thunderbird tomorrow and maybe look an finding some Outlook config information.

These things are never super smooth, but rest assured that all your email is safe and sound somewhere 🙂

Some notes on mail.

So should you not have a proper SMTP host (or don’t want to use your internet providers’), you can also use mail.rezgeek.com as your SMTP (outbound) mail host, but you will need to tell it that you have to authenticate. Again user will be username@rezgeek.com and the same pass as you provided for your email.

For those of you that used IMAP before, like myself, and were storing all your email on geek, you will find they didn’t come with you. I haven’t hammered out the process for myself yet, but you can still connect to the old server at old.rezgeek.com.

I’ll post later on with how I end up managing my mailbox from old to new when I get a chance to properly meld them together. My basic idea likely though is to have both my account on my server set up and my acct on dreamhost in the same mail client. From there I believe you could drag and drop folders from one host to the other (I don’t really recommend doing this)

The default mailbox size that I created for everyone is 250M. For us IMAPer’s that may not be enough if you store all your email online. I think maybe I”ll bump that out to 1G here shortly. On geek it was 512M, but if you made subfolders and moved the mail to that, it didn’t count towards your 512M.

Anyways, more work.

Continuing work

So the toc/eoc/coc forums have been moved. All email accounts should be up and running. I haven’t yet tried out the mail system, but you will find if you never actually downloaded your email, it will still be on my old server. You can pull down your old email using pop/imap of old.rezgeek.com.

Maintenance starts…

So we’ll throw caution at the wind and migrate DNS first. This will play a little differently for everyone, but it will all likely work itself out by tomorrow at either rate. For those looking to pull old mail off the old machine, or get files from their public_html dirs, old.rezgeek.com is the old server for you to access for the time being.

Mar 14, D-Day for migration

I’m not quite sure how I’m going to push all the data I need to push up Dreamhost in time. I have like 5 or 6 galleries that I have to get up there, mine being 40G, another than I’m moving is 25G. Contemplating taking data to work to upload it, which just seems wrong.

Not that any one that matters is currently reading this, but when I migrate, people’s mail usernames will actually have to be user@domain.com, not just user.

But I digress, I am essentially talking to myself. Can’t play WoW cause I’ve stuffed my Internet pipe with an upload that I don’t want to stop, cause I don’t want to figure out how sync it later.

Welcome to my new maintenance page :)

Since it seems that all I ever actually post on rezgeek.com is that there is upcoming server maintenance, it should seem only fitting that the first post on the new host be exactly that. I am currently evaluating a move that would see my domains finally leave the confines of my basement hosting in an attempt to reduce my cable bill and electricity costs here at home.

As long as I don’t find any gotchas here in the next week or two I think it’s safe to assume that this migration will happen. If anyone happens to see this, that means someone actually hits my residentgeek.com domain (and is likely not someone I even know).

Hi 🙂