Emailchemy 10.1 was released with these changes:

• Improved IMAP server performance – faster imports
• New Google Apps Uploader feature to fixes Gmail’s Sent folder for uploaded mail
• New option for better handling of international characters in folder names

The new Google Apps Uploader feature requires a bit of an explanation. In Gmail, there is no notion of a “Sent” folder. Yes, there is a link you can click that says “Sent Mail” which will show you mail that you sent, but it’s not a folder in the sense that there are specific messages put into a container (i.e. a folder) of messages. The subtle though important difference in how Gmail’s Sent Items link works is that it does a real-time search of all your email messages and shows you a list of all of the messages that have your gmail.com email address (or Google Apps address) in the “From: ” header. Effectively, this is the same as having a real “Sent” folder, but it breaks if you try to import messages into Gmail.

Why? Because if you are importing email into Gmail (or Google Apps), the email you have sent from your previous mail accounts will have your old email address in the “From:” header field of each sent message and they won’t show up in the search results you see when you click the “Sent Mail” link in Gmail. As far as Gmail is concerned, they just aren’t “sent” messages.

So, when you do see your old sent messages in Gmail, Gmail will think they are received messages and display them as such in the list, showing your old email address in the “name field of the message list (because you were the sender, remember).

Gmail only shows three fields in the message list: the sender, the subject and the date — and you can’t change this as you might be able to in Outlook or Thunderbird. Sure, Emailchemy can upload your sent messages into Gmail and then tag them with the name of the folder they came from, so these messages appear to be in a folder called “Sent Items” or “Sent”, but Gmail will still display these messages with the same 3 fields: sender (you), subject and date. Not helpful at all when you are trying to find an old email you sent to your boss.

In Emailchemy 10.1, we introduced a new option on the Google Apps Uploader tool: “Re-write sender of messages in ‘Sent’ folder to force them into Gmail ‘Sent Mail’”. When you check this box, Emailchemy will change the “From:” field of all your sent messages to contain your new Google Apps email address. Then, “Sent Mail” will work as it should, showing all your old sent messages too. This option has been added to the command line version of the Google Apps Uploader too.

Emailchemy 10.1 is a free update for all licensed users of Emailchemy 10.0.

Here’s a walkthrough I recently sent to a customer who had questions about how the Google Apps Uploader works. I’m posting it here for future reference.

1) Using either the “Conversion Wizard” or “Advanced Conversion” tool in Emailchemy’s toolbox, convert your mail to Standard mbox Format, giving it a name like “converted”.

2) Switch over to Emailchemy’s Google Apps Uploader tool, select the “converted” folder and enter the target email account’s address (the account that you want to receive the uploaded messages) and leave the default settings for the other options for now.

3) When you click the “upload” button, you’ll have to authenticate to Google Apps. The account you authenticate with must be authorized to upload messages or be the domain administrator. The administrator may also choose to allow specific account holders to
upload their own, too. Also, the “upload email” feature must be enabled from the domain admin console before this works. If you are behind a web proxy server, click the “proxy” button and enter the details.

4) Click “login”

As the upload is going on, you may get a timeout message if you lose connectivity or if a message is taking too long to upload. The upload thread is still going even though it is asking you for what to do next, so you can safely step away from the computer. When the connection is restored and a response comes back from Google, the timeout dialog will go away by itself. In other words, it assumes you want to keep waiting even if you don’t explicity say so.

If an upload error occurs during the upload, Emailchemy will automatically retry before performing the action you specified on the first screen (ask, skip, or stop). If the failure repeats, Emailchemy will perform the specified action. If it asks you, you can choose to skip or stop or always skip.

If you stop an upload for any reason, Emailchemy will ask you if you want to resume the next time you start the Uploader.

When finished, Emailchemy will report the number of messages “processed” — this is the number of messages Emailchemy tried to upload, not adjusted for the ones you told it to skip. This number should be the same as the number of messages converted, reported by the Conversion Wizard tool.

Gmail will take up to an hour to display all the uploaded messages. Then, any messages that was “read” will not be in the Inbox – they will be in the “All Mail” folder. Only “new” or “unread” messages will be in the Inbox.

Emailchemy tags/labels every message with a timestamp of the upload event (something like “upload20090120″). This is useful in that you can click on this label to see the list of all uploaded messages, and even delete all the messages with this tag.

Again, keep in mind that Gmail gives you “conversation” counts, not message counts, so the conversation count will likely not match the number of messages uploaded that Emailchemy reported. Google uses some fuzzy logic to try to group messages into conversations, so things may get grouped together that should not be grouped together, and that is an unavoidable feature of the Gmail interface.

Emailchemy's Google Apps Uploader tool

Which to use? I like both. That way, you get to preserve the original hierarchy and still have the flexibility of “tags”.