Archives for May 2006

Copying my Gmail account to a new “Gmail for your Domain” account

May 29, 2006 by Tom 3 Comments

I recently got accepted for the beta of “Gmail for your Domain” – a service that allows you to have professional email addresses like [email protected] instead of coolbob123@ gmail.com.

Then came the problem of over 6000 emails that I had in my current Gmail account that I now wanted in my new Gmail account. How to migrate the emails? I was surprised that I got so many good answers when I searched “migrating gmail account”. I ended up trying variations of all the solutions given in the top 3-4 results, but they all ended up being too complicated, not working, etc.

Because it was such a pain, I thought I’d share my solution. I finally ended up using Mark Lyon’s GMail Loader (GML), which is by far the best utility out there for it.

I had to do the following:

Download my mail from my old Gmail account into clean account in OutlookExpress
Find out where OutlookExpress was storing my mail (Tools -> Options -> Maintenance -> Store Folder)
Go to that location and copy the .dbx file (and place it somewhere I could locate it easily) I wanted to upload to my new Gmail (inbox.dbx) in my case
Download a utility called DBXConv and run it on my newly acquired dbx file. It’s a command line utility so I simply had to run “dbxconv inbox.dbx” and it converted it to the much more agreable mbx format.
Run the Gmail Loader
It didn’t work right away for me. The default SMTP server gsmtp57.google.com doesn’t work. I then made the mistake of assuming that Google had disabled all their SMTP servers that would work with a program like this. I then tried my ISP’s SMTP, my web host’s SMTP, and several other SMTP’s. They all didn’t work (I think because they all didn’t allow open relays or something.). If I had read the instructions all the way, however :), I would have done what he suggested and it would have worked without all the extra flailing. I did what he said and I used mob.net’s mx tool to find a working Google SMTP server, entered that in and it worked!!
Now all that was left was to upload the 6,000+ emails, which ended up taking about 10 hours. Good thing it was a three day weekend!

Google Web Toolkit

May 24, 2006 by Tom Leave a Comment

Wow, Google just released an AJAX programming tool called the Google Web Toolkit.

It is a AJAX development environment that allows you to easily develop applications like Google Maps and GMail. The language is Java (not javascript), althought it ends up outputting a mixture of javascript and HTML when you “compile” it.

I don’t know much of Java, but this has peaked my interest. I’m definitely going to be playing around with this one.

WordPress PermaLinks in IIS without the mod_rewrite

May 21, 2006 by Tom 171 Comments

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was investigating a way to use real permalinks without using any of the ISAPI mod_rewrite dlls. For the uninitiated, mod_rewrite is not natively supported in IIS (Window’s server), and to get the same functionality, you have to install separate programs. I’ve done that and that is how this blog has survived on a Windows server for the past year or so.

I was convinced that needn’t be the case though. There must be a way to have permalinks without having to install a whole separate mod_rewrite program (or extension). I detailed my plan in this post.

Well, I finally got around to it – and the plan worked!

Here’s the gist of it. It uses custom 404 redirect to send all “Page Not Found” errors to a script that reads a bunch of regular expressions (don’t worry, you don’t have learn regular expressions to use this) and figures out what page to feed back.

Now, some people may find my solution a bit odd considering it is written in ASP. You used ASP to extend wordpress?? Yes, and it worked :).

More detailed instructions, and a link to the needed files are located here:

WordPress Permalinks in IIS