Moving Messages to a Gmail Account from Thunderbird E-mail

This is a method to downloading and saving e-mail from Bates Webmail. This allows for folders and individual messages to be moved/saved to another e-mail program, rather than a long text file, opened in Wordpad.

1. Download, install and configure Thunderbird on your personal computer. (Instructions). Thunderbird will allow you to save all of your mail to your own computer.
2. Setup a Gmail account (http://mail.google.com/mail/signup/) if you do not already have one. (It’s FREE).
3. Follow the instructions (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=180189) to add your gmail account to Thunderbird.  Also please consult the additional settings instructions for Thunderbird on http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78892
4. In Thunderbird, drag the folders from your Bates account to your gmail account. All the messages in the folder will be copied into gmail. Depending on the number of messages, this may take awhile.