I’ve been thinking about moving some of my older email out of a rather large Outlook PST into GMail, mainly for backup purposes. However, since this is far from a unique idea, I decided to see what others have done to solve this problem.

First I discovered Mark Lyon’s PHP-based Google GMail Loader (GML), which in addition to loading email, it can also be used as a remote to backup tool (I think there’s a 7.5M file limit imposed by Google).

It doesn’t yet natively parse PST files, but Mark has made available a handy command-line tool called readPST that will convert a PST file into MBOX format supported by his script.

Cheah Chu Yeow, inspired by Mark’s GML, wrote his own GMail tool with a GUI in Python called gExodus. It also only supports MBOX mail files, but includes a nice feature for applying labels to your imported mail so you don’t clutter your GMail inbox.

Finally, in the works is a Windows-only tool called GmailerXP, which in addition to importing MBOX and PST mail formats will also act as a rich-client for GMail. Allowing you to read your GMail, apply remote and local filters, manage contacts and configure your GMail settings.

GmailerXP is certainly the most robust of the GMail tools. Yet I’d likely only use the import PST features. It’s not available for download yet, but it is being actively developed on SourceForge.

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