For years I’ve used and recommended Google Apps and Gmail to others, and have found them extremely reliable.

The last week I’ve run repeatedly into the same problem, and I’m sure that some other users must come across.  The problem occurred when I wanted to send an email to a group of science coordinators across the county.

I even have a list of emails set up in my contacts address book (on Google) for this purpose.  I emailed the group with an update and a link to a Google form for them to complete (only 8 users in the To: field).

The email bounced with the following message (Message rejected.  See http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=69585 for more information):

The solution in the past was to split the users between the To: and CC: fields.  I tried this again as my tried and trusted method of getting my email sent (in the absence of any useful advice from Google).  The email wasn’t sent and I received the following message instead (the error that the other server returned was: 550 550 5.4.5 Daily sending quota exceeded):

It now transpires that I am unable to send any email, at least for the rest of the day (at least) because google think I’m a spammer.  Nice one Google.

My email had a Word attachment and a link.  It was sent to a group of 8 people (all in my contact book).  It seems that this makes me a spammer.  Is it not within the realms of possibility that there are users out there who may want to send a link to a group of contacts.  Directing me to use Google Groups is not a workable solution Google – since most of the people I am trying to contact have barely mastered email.

I would advise Google to tweak their spam detecting algorithms.  If you have lots of people opening accounts to send spam, perhaps you need to look at the meagre amount of information you need to give to get a google account rather than cutting off your loyal users who merely want to email a link to a list of contacts.

Google touts its apps suite as a dependable and reliable system, and yet it has gaping holes like this, and yet it has published very little information for users telling them what to happen if this happens.  Google sort your act out if you want to see more people who have #gonegoogle.

I recently had to move my mail between a GMail account and a Google Apps GMail account. It is possible to move mail from one to the other with all tags intact, however there are several steps (the exact number depends on the number of tags you have) but the process consists mostly of repeating the same step.

Enable IMAP on both Gmail accounts and configure your mail client for both.  I used Windows Live Mail since it has a “Copy to folder …” option (and of course is free and readily available for Windows 7).

Replicate the tags structure for your destination GMail account so that it has all the tags of the source GMail account.  You can do this from inside the GMail web interface (while you enabling IMAP support).

Configure and sync both accounts in your mail client so you have a full list of tags (folders in your mail client) for both.

Your mail client sees the GMail tags as folders.  Go to the first folder you want to transfer – in the image I am copying my sent mail.  Select all the mail you want to copy.

Right click on your selected mail and select “Copy to folder” and then select the same mail folder of the GMail account you are copying to.

Click OK and you will see a progress bar as your mail client copies the mail from account to account.

You must repeat this for every folder/tag you want to transfer including the all mail folder (if you want to move everything or untagged email).  Keeping copying them to their corresponding folder on the destination account.

When you have finished the tagging/folder structure should be identical for both accounts.

You may also want to move your incoming mail filters and contacts from account to account as well.  Google provides a Google Labs feature for moving your filters, and you can export your contacts in a Google friendly format for moving from one account to another.

That’s it.  If you have a few hundred Mb of mail the transfer doesn’t take too long (depending on your connection speed).  You might want to do this at a quiet time of the day so that Google’s servers are under less load.

Update: I’ve just found an excellent piece of software that does automatically what I was doing manually.  It is called GMail Backup and is available from here.   Download the email from the account you are moving from, then change the settings and restore to the email account you are moving to.  The software takes care of labels etc (I’ve tested it with Google Apps and Gmail and have used it to move email in both directions).