Jason Irwin dot Net

Migrating from Outlook to Google

January 18, 2010 Featured, Internet, Technology, Windows Mobile

Microsoft Outlook has played an important role in my life for the better part of a decade.  Aside from the added benefit of easily synchronizing with the various Palm and HP PDAs I’ve owned throughout the years, it has offered the ability to easily synchronize with the Exchange servers found at various employers.  However, after many years of faithful service, I’ve decided to move to something else: Google.

Don’t get me wrong here; I really enjoy using Outlook.  I’ve been an avid fan of Outlook since 2002, and have been using the 2003 version since a few weeks after the release of the Office 2003 suite.  That said, some recent happenings have forced my hand.

Earlier last week I had tried to renew some of my services with GoDaddy, a company that I’ve had many horrible customer and user experiences with.  Unfortunately, I was unable to renew using the balance in my PayPal account, despite the company’s acceptance of PayPal in the shopping cart.  According to someone in customer support, they require services such as websites be renewed via credit card; something that has not been necessary until recently, apparently.  What this means is that the various domains that I’ve had registered with the company as well as my email services will not be renewable via my preferred method.  Considering the number of headaches and problems I’ve had with the company for simple things like registering domains, managing hosting packages, backing up databases, contacting customer support, and navigating their administration panel, it’s time to call a spade a spade and move on.

Considering Options

As of January 1st, I had decided that any and all work that I need to do for my employer will be done on the computers they give me, rather than my own.  What this means, though, is that I’ll need a way to access my email from either system without any headaches.  The first thing I had thought of was going back to using IMAP, but I cannot access the ports required by most IMAP servers from behind my employer’s firewall.  While I could go back to using RoundCube on my webhost, I decided that it would probably be better to use a service that is a bit more reliable: Google’s.

That said, I didn’t want to give up my email address.  I wanted to continue using the various @j2fi.net email addresses that have served me well since their inception.  Luckily, Google has no problem handling this.

Switching to Google in 6-ish Easy Steps

Making the switch to Google is insanely simple.  To be completely honest, I’m surprised that more people aren’t doing this with their own domains, yet.  Here’s how to do it:

1. sign up for Google Apps, and enter your domain name
2. once you log in as admin, re-create your email accounts
3. point the MX records for your email server to Google’s (explained below)
4. download and install the Google Email Uploader, linking it to your email address
5. download and install the Google Outlook Connector, linking it to your email address
6. synchronize your Outlook data with Google

I needed about 6 hours to upload all of my email, contacts, and calendar events … that’s over a decade of mail and schedules, with about 200 contacts thrown in for good measure.

Pointing Your MX Records to Google

In order for Google to receive your mail, you’ll need to have any email sent to your domain forwarded to Google.  The steps I’ve listed below are for CPanel, but many hosting interfaces may work in a similar fashion.

First, get the MX values from Google’s super-helpful pages.  From there, log into your CPanel and click on the MX Entry icon.

Next, enter the MX values that Google provided. Be sure to delete any existing values you might already have.

After you’re done, you should see something like this:

As you can see, I’m not using every address that Google is providing. This is mainly because I don’t believe we need to use each and every address, but I could be wrong.

Once all of this was done, I was set and ready to go.  But there was one small thing missing: Synchronization with Windows Mobile.

Sync Google with WinMo

My HP iPaq has played an important role in both my professional and personal life for a long time.  As such, I cannot have it crippled by moving my  email, calendar, and contacts to a service that doesn’t support it.  Luckily, though, this isn’t the case.  Google provides many mobile synchronization options for all of the major mobile platforms.  After following the simple instructions I was all set and ready to go.

Any nuisances?  Not really.  It took about a day to get used to using “labels” rather than folders to store email, and even less time to get accustomed to how Google Calendar works.  All in all, I’m quite happy with the setup.  The next goal will be to get my hands on a Nexus One, or something equivalent, to complete the assimilation process.

Tags: GMail, google, iPaq, Outlook, WinMo