Google open-sources a tool for exporting Thunderbird emails to Gmail

Google today announced that it has open-sourced a new tool for pushing emails in Thunderbird up to Gmail, where it can be accessed on mobile devices.

The tool doesn’t come with a simple one-click interface.

“It is not user friendly in any way. If you are not a developer, you probably want to stay away,” Google warned in the description for the new tool on GitHub.

Nevertheless, this could be useful for certain people who might have legacy accounts that are difficult to access on any device other than your main desktop. Data like whether emails have been read, flagged, and put in folders can be sent along, too.

Google is also releasing an open-source tool that admins can use to send bulk .mbox files into Google Apps for Work.

“It is a Python script that will do bulk imports of multiple mailboxes into multiple accounts in a domain. It’s admin-managed, so your users won’t have to individually import their archives,” Gmail software engineer Ian Flanigan and Google for Work technical solutions engineer Liron Newman wrote in a blog post on the news.

Gmail already has more than 900 million users. The second tool could in particular could help Google Apps, specifically Gmail, become more pervasive across large companies. The first tool, meanwhile, could help technical types make Gmail even more useful and less dependent on a single-device email client from Mozilla, which competes with Google in the browser market.