Marc Cuban living the Google Lifestyle

"I was walking to a business dinner in NYC. Someone told me they were going to start working with a new manager and asked me if I knew him. The name sounded familiar and I thought I had done something with him during the Broadcast.com days. A quick GMail search from my phone and I found 2 emails we had exchanged when he was trying to sell a company he was involved with back in 1996. That’s why I use GMail."

The gmail transfer question is interesting. I spent some days trying to upload my mail archives and looking for the best solution.

In the end I configured 5 pop3 account on my server for gmail to fetch concurrently, and filled them with my archives. I did use http://imap-upload.sourceforge.net and http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/ to get the mboxes into the pop3 server and move mails archives from a gmail account to a google hosted account.

Yet the whole process was slow and not that good: - Some email changed encoding (chinese characters) while they looked good with mutt - some were dupes and gmail did not dedupe them - many had a problem with the date (missing from the mail, but the last MX date could be used) and so gmail assigned them to the date when they were retrieved from the pop3 server - some mails were also merged because of _From separation in mbox not supported by imap-upload or getmail (can't remember ATM) - sent mail could not be filed into "sent" - chat archives could not be moved between gmail accounts - pop3 retrieval accepted a max of 200k emails IIRC, so I had to do it by batches - pop3 refused some mail (it thought they had viruses or exes attachments) and let them in the pop3, so I had to move them manually while another 200k batch was running - gmail pop3 retrieval also means additional delays between iterations

Finally, when you correct any bug, having to go through the whole process again is painful (thrash all the import and start again, reload the pop3 queue, resume 200k batches)

Then there's the spam problem. You will have false negatives. And if the process is taking days/months depending on the size of your archive, you'd better remember to check the spam folder and move then to inbox, or add a special rule to never sent any email from your archive to spam. But if you do that, you'll fill your gmail account with some spam which you may not want if you didn't take care to delete your spam and have some mboxes containing up to 80% of spam as I had.

For now I don't think there's a good solution and I gave up until I have more time to spend on the problem and a workaround on the limitations (pop3 is a killer)

But it remains an interesting problem, because I believe there's a market for a good gmail migration offer. (I'd have paid $50 or more to have the mboxes properly integrated in gmail, and I guess I'm not alone!)

I'm really impressed with Cuban's genuine interest in technology. It seems like he buys lots of new products simply to try them out (Logitech Revue and Samsung Tab). He's always trying to make himself more productive and find an advantage.

Of course he has the advantage of enough money to test out all these new products and technologies.