I have been maintaining my @kudithipudi.org address for some time now. I had all my E-mail from 1998 saved on my laptop until I had a hard drive disaster (ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR DATA), and lost all that E-mail. Ever since then, I have been trying to come up with a method to make my E-mail “crash” proof. I could have moved to using any of the popular free mail platforms (hotmail, yahoo, gmail etc.), but I didn’t want to loose the ability to send E-mail from my personal @kudithipudi.org address.
Google to the rescue – I was checking the settings on gmail the other day and noticed that I could setup a different E-mail address (which has to be verified) as my default “from address”. So I started forwarding E-mail from my domain to gmail. The problem now was to upload all the E-mail I have in Thunderbird up to gmail. That way, I would have all my E-mail in one single place and allow me to search through it. Google to the rescue again :), a query for “upload mail from thunderbird to gmail” returned this cool utility by Mark Lyon. It allows you to specify the source of your email and uploads the mail to your gmail account.
The next challenge was to find the directory/file where Thunderbird stores all the email. Google to the rescue again. You can get the location of the mail files from the account settings screen –> Local Folders in Thunderbird.
I am in E-mail bliss now. Use Gmail for all my messaging purposes. Next task would be to start using the Google Calendar.
