So the Uni have now begun rolling out readingLive (a rebrand of Live@edu) to all students, so once mine was activated this evening I proceeded to update my Gmail settings (as described in my previous post on how to make University e-mail usable) and ran into a whole stack of problems. I would go so far as to say the process was a nightmare. So here is what I learnt so that the same problems do not befall you.

You may have seen my recent rant about the University of Reading’s e-mail software. I got so fed up, in fact, that I decided to do something about it.

That something was to “migrate” my University e-mail to Google Mail. With a release a few months ago, Google gave Mail the complete toolset you need to get it to act as a mail client for your Uni account – seamlessly. This wasn’t the only reason, though – with a Google account, the mail and contacts sync much better with my Nexus One.

Here’s how I migrated so you can too – in about 15 minutes.

One thing I see appearing on Twitter a lot is people striving for #InboxZero – i.e. to have no e-mails unread in their Inbox.

Seeing as I get presumably considerably less e-mail than these other much more important people, I see that as having a completely clear Inbox. (I use my Inbox as a todo list – if it’s in there it needs dealing with.)

So here’s what I do to help get and stay at #InboxZero.

I was always under the impression that part of the point of University was to help get people ready to go out into the real world and make a contribution to society.

I can’t help but thinking that the University is trying to not help us in its use of mail software.

“Prayer” (the name of the service, and also what we regularly do when we need to receive an important e-mail) seems to have recently been re-branded as an IT Services thing, but it originally started out as an open-source project at the University of Cambridge.

I’m almost fairly certain that it would never ever be used in a corporate environment. Here’s why.

Since the recent arrival of my Nexus One, I decided it would be a great idea to move all the e-mail for my website over to Google Apps. This enables all the snazzy benefits of the Nexus One, without the polling required to read IMAP mail accounts. Unfortunately my Uni e-mail will still have to be IMAP – but that’s a post for another day.

Moving over to Google Apps was a complete breeze – a few buttons and a couple of DNS updates and everything’s working beautifully within literally minutes.

However, for some reason the Google Mail Uploader didn’t want to play nice with my combination of Outlook 2010 / weird PST locations / multiple mail accounts / multiple inboxes.

So what I ended up doing was creating an IMAP account for my new Google Apps account, then simply dragging and dropping large chunks of archived mail from my old IMAP server into Google Mail’s inbox. Took a while and needed to be done in batches, but worked a treat!