Lowter

Migrating Email, RSS, and Calendar Online

Published on the 6th of March 2008

By Ethan Poole

This week I have been working to migrate much of my data to online services, particularly my email, my RSS feeds, and my calendar. Before, I had been using Apple Mail, iCal, and Vienna (external link) to manage all of these services, which pretty much tied the data to my main iMac. However, whenever I went to use another computer (particularly my iBook), I was left without this crucial data, so I decided I wanted to move the data to a more centralised available location: online. The primary inspiration to move my data online came from a blog post over at Zen Habits (external link).

Already, my email was stored using Gmail (external link), and downloaded to my iMac in Mail. Moving over to the online client was all I had to do here. My mail was nicely stored and ready for me to use. I migrated my calendar over to Google Calendar (external link), which only took a few minutes via its import feature. For RSS, I decided to use Google Reader (external link), which proved to take a bit more time because I had to manually add each feed I read. However, all of my email, RSS, and calendars are stored via the simplistic and reliable Google services.

My choice to use Google was simple: it is easy to use. Since I already used Gmail, it took only a few minutes to get everything setup. However, one complaint I have is that I was not able to link my Google Reader account to my Gmail and Google Calendar accounts. My main Google account is via Google Apps, so I can use an @lowter.us email address and such. However, Google Reader is not available for Google Apps users, so I had to setup a separate account to use this service.

Honestly, it is very nice to have all my data centralised, as tonight I easily read my RSS feeds on my laptop while watching Lost. Then I made a few emails and setup some email reminders for upcoming school events. And I did not have to worry about syncing the data back to my iMac. Oh, how much I love easy centralisation, it is so organised and hassle-free!

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