It’s done: I’ve moved all of my e-mail over to Gmail. Folks at Google, please don’t let me down.

So how did I go about doing it? Let me tell you…

Step 1: Rationalize E-mails

I had almost 2GB of e-mail data and many thousands of e-mail messages in my Thunderbird Profile. I knew a lot of that was crap, redundant, and no longer needed so the first thing I did was whittle this down to about half a gigabyte of data and under 10k of e-mails.

The cool thing with Thunderbird is that you can sort your e-mails by attachment. That made it easy to find messages with big attachments and then either get rid the attachments while retaining the text or delete the e-mails outright.

I also deleted tonnes of other e-mails that I knew I wouldn’t need in the future. Indeed, as you may have gathered, I was brutal in my deletion criteria.

Step 2: Rationalize Contacts

Next, I exported all my contacts from Yahoo! Mail and Orkut and imported them into Thunderbird, which is my central contacts repository (I even have my old Outlook contacts in here) and is the easiest to mess around with. I then went through that list: updating, removing duplicates, and deleting old contacts.

I also went through my list of Facebook friends and, for those who weren’t already in my address book (only 3 or 4 of them), I added their e-mail information as well. 

I then exported that updated list into a CSV file. This file I imported into Gmail. For the heck of it — and to test how well it worked — I also imported that file into my Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail accounts. It worked just fine.

Step 3: Upload

Uploading thousands of e-mails to Gmail isn’t easy. There are two things you have to watch out for: First, it’s safer to upload e-mails (i.e. drag them from a local folder into a Gmail IMAP folder) in smaller batch sizes: ideally under 30 e-mails at a time. Second, don’t start uploading the next batch immediately after the first one has finished uploading: give it a few seconds. Why? Because the Gmail IMAP system has spam-blocking and load-controlling algorithms built into it. If you flood it with e-mail uploads — either too many or too fast — it locks you out for a short period of time, which is a real pain.

All of this makes uploading e-mails a long and somewhat tedious process though it’s not the end of the world. In fact, I did most of it in the background, which made it quite easy to do: I’d be working on other stuff and, every few minutes or so, I’d Alt-Tab to Thunderbird and upload another batch.

Step 4: Use

Now comes the fun part: actually using the new system (which I described in an earlier blog post). I now access all my e-mail either through Thunderbird (via IMAP) or a web browser (usually Firefox). Meanwhile, I’ve stopped Thunderbird from automatically checking my POP accounts. Instead, all those are POP-ed directly into Gmail, which has the additional benefit of drastically reducing the spam I get.

I still use Thunderbird when sending messages from my MBS account since I use a different e-mail signature for that but, otherwise, I’ve found it easier to move entirely to using Gmail’s web interface. Not having both an e-mail client and browser open all the time also consumes significantly fewer computing resources which, on my ancient laptop, is a real blessing.

What I do lose from not using an e-mail client are the event reminder pop-ups that I used get but I’ve found a workaround for that: I’ve configured my Google Calendar to send me a notification via e-mail and I’ve installed Gmail Notifier so I get a pop-up when that notification e-mail arrives. It’s not quite the same thing but, like I said, it’s a workaround.

Conclusion

All in all, I am very happy with my decision to move to Gmail and the way in which everything has worked out so far. Here’s hoping things continue to go this well in the future.

Oh, one last thing: When I do get a new laptop (tablet PC, actually), I might start using an e-mail client again. What I’ll do then is configure IMAP to maintain offline (i.e. local) copies of all my Gmail folders. That way, I’ll get the best of both worlds: e-mails available locally and in the cloud, both always synchronized. Also, you can never have too many backups, can you? :)

The ‘I Think She Knows Interlude’ part (i.e. the second half) of Justin Timberlake’s song Lovestoned / I Think She Knows Interlude is really quite awesome.

I’ve heard the song a few times before, but mostly on the radio. Today, however, I heard it on my earphones (thanks to Got Radio) and I am very impressed. Others think so too. In fact, John Mayer did a really cool electric guitar cover of it:

Cool, no?

[Via All Things Go]

In case you missed the first episode of Salam Cafe — the new, very Aussie, very funny comedy panel and sketch show that debuted on SBS on Wednesday — you can now watch it on the SBS website. I’m guessing all future episodes will be published there as well.

The show is about the funny side of being a Muslim in Australia — which means there’s plenty of Muslim and Aussie humour — but is also about being a Muslim, particularly a young Muslim, in this day and age. Here’s what The Age had to say about it.

So, set your reminders for 10pm on Wednesdays on SBS and have a good laugh.

Great article on the SciAm website about sleep debt, which is the difference between how much you slept and how much you should have slept.

The trick is that you can’t make up for your lack of sleep during weeknights just by sleeping late on weekends, though that’s very important too. For proper recovery sleep you need to be sleeping a little extra every day for a period of time till your natural sleep cycle is restored (i.e. your debt has been repaid).

Being a sleep aficionado myself, I can safely say that I already knew that. And having worked in startups for most of my life — i.e. being someone who swings from periods of no work to periods of intense work which, as you would expect, messes with your sleep cycle — there are a few other bits of sleep pattern wisdom that I could add. But I’ll save those for another blog post since there’s lots to say.

I watched Iron Man yesterday and it rocks! I particularly liked that the writers took their time in developing Stark’s character and back story — like the Yinsen story arc — before jumping into the action, which was also nicely done. In fact, what made the movie special was that it was much more of an action-drama (the birth of a superhero) than just a pure action movie (a superhero goes around kicking ass). The dialogue, acting, and smatterings of humour were all really good too.

Of course it was interesting to hear Raza, one of the main bad buys, speaking Urdu. The last time we had a cool but seriously evil bald bad guy that spoke a language from this region was when Amrish Puri played Mola Ram in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom — though, of course, he spoke Hindi and not Urdu.

Faran Tahir (who is of Pakistani origin, by the way) also played Raza a little less one-dimensionally than I was expecting, which was nice. That said, Raza was very much a mix between Puri’s Mola Ram and Crispin Glover’s Creepy Thin Man from the Charlie’s Angels franchise: “menacing” to the point of being almost funny, but still reasonably believable (like the bad guys from xXx, for example). [See update below]

Oh, and all US patriotism aside — this is an American superhero movie about a military weapons manufacturer, after all — it was interesting how they made the main bunch of over-the-top bad guys a reasonably international group of weapons traders who spoke Urdu, Arabic, Russian, Hungarian, and a whole bunch of other languages. All the cool terrorists are either Middle Eastern, Central European, or Scandinavian these days. Gone are the days of the evil Japanese, Vietnamese, Germans, and Russians…though the ultimate bad guy is still, of course, British.

Also, to keep up with the times, they moved the entire Iron Man story from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Even Yinsen (originally Ho Yinsen) had his back-story moved from “communist Vietnam” to “terrorist Afghanistan”. I guess that means the Bond franchise now has dibs on European bad guys; the Spider-Man, X-Men, and Batman franchises have dibs on American bad guys; the Transformers and Superman franchises have dibs on outer-space bad guys; and the Bourne franchise has dibs on the CIA and other intelligence agencies as bad guys. Have I missed any?

Anyway, I don’t have much more to say about the movie itself — a lot of others have already said pretty much everything I wanted to say (and have probably said it better) — so I’ll just link to some good reviews, instead:

• The Bad Astronomer recommends you go watch it.
• Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek loves what Downey Jr. brought to the role and appreciated the fact that the writers kept the focus on the characters and not the action.
• A.O. Scott from the New York Times says that this is “a superhero movie that’s good in unusual ways”.

All in all, it’s an excellent movie that I would highly recommend.

UPDATE: Trekker alerted me to this excellent PULSE News article on Faran Tahir and his role in Iron Man. In it, Tahir is quoted as saying:

“The thing I loved about playing Raza was the approach. It’s so easy in today’s reality, when you have a movie set somewhere in the Middle East or Afghanistan, to have everything become about the current terrorism in those nations. However, it wasn’t about that. It was about a different ideology. My group of people, my minions and I, are the real soldiers of fortune. We use whatever we can to get the power. It wasn’t about religion, but we’d use religion, corporate espionage — whatever we needed to get ahead. We have no alliance to anyone. We have our own ideology: profit, power, prestige — it brings everything to an honest level. People do a lot of things under the guise of ideologies, but it’s all about power in the end.”

Awesome. Now I’m really looking forward to seeing Tahir in the upcoming Star Trek movie.