At the last BIGsig meeting, we went through all the necessary steps to set up a Google Apps account for a library.  Google also has very thorough instructions to get you through this process, which can be found here:

Google Instructions

If you’re feeling brave, you can also get started by yourself.

So once you’ve got the setup done, there’s a couple of ways to import mail from your current lcls.org account.  The import process depends entirely on what your current e-mail client is- I’ll cover Outlook and the Mailman web-interface.

For Outlook:

Google handily provides an uploading tool that you can download here.  Once you’ve installed it, you have only to choose which Outlook mailboxes you want to upload.

For Mailman:

To get your mail out of Mailman, you need to setup an additional account in your Google inbox.  Mailman will only allow messages to be pulled from your inbox- if you have messages in other folders, you need to move them into the inbox first.  After you’ve moved your messages to your Mailman inbox, it’s time to migrate them to Google.    Here’s how you do that:

1. Start in your Google Inbox, and click on ‘Settings’
2. On the settings page, click on ‘Accounts’
3. Click on ‘Add a mail account you own’
4. Type in your lcls.org email address
5. Your username should already be typed in, and you need to type in your password
6. Click ‘Add Account’
7. Take a deep breath; you’re done!

It will take a few minutes for your mail to be imported, so sit back for a moment and marvel at what you’ve accomplished.

Wrapping up

Now that you’ve got your Google Account set up and your mail imported, there’s a few housekeeping things that need doing.  First, you should send out a message from your new account letting everyone know you’ve got a new address (make sure it gets to Julia Pernicka, or you won’t be on any lcls lists).

It’s also a good idea to set your Mailman account to forward all mail to your new e-mail address- this can be done under ‘Options > Forwarding’.  Last, you may want to put a message in your vacation responder that you’ve moved to a new address.  This will let everybody who sends a message to your old lcls.org address know that you’ve moved on.

Repeat the process for each of your staff members!

One more thing…

By default, your Google login page is http://mail.google.com/a/yourlibrary.org.  If you’d like to shorten that a bit, like mail.yourlibrary.org, give me a call at the System and I’ll make the necessary changes to your DNS record.

Tags: bigsig, gmail

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. # # You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. # #