We got exciting news to share with you — a complete new version of YippieMove is on the way. The new version comes with a ton of new features and a super-slick interface.

In this sneak peek we will introduce one of the three major new features in YippieMove ’09. The feature we will reveal to you is…*drumroll*…an open step 2. That’s right, when we launch YippieMove ’09 you will be able to transfer your email between any of our 100+ pre-configured accounts, not only to Gmail. If that’s not enough, you can even enter your own server, just like in Step 1, using the option ‘Other.’ Isn’t this amazing? This opens up so many new doors.

We’ve already extensively tested this feature with our ‘custom migration’-service, but now we’re ready allow the rest of you in too!

Enough said, here is a screenshot from the new version.

Transfer to anywhere

We’ve worked really hard on making YippieMove the worlds easiest (and best) email transfer too. We hope you enjoyed this sneak peek. Stay tuned, as we expect to be able to launch YippieMove ’09 to the public this quarter.

I think it’s fair to say that few people outside of Google have more experience of working with Google’s IMAP implementation (GIMAP) than we have. Since we launched YippieMove more than six months ago, we’ve performed a lot of transfers to Google using IMAP. Truth be told, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to find workarounds for bugs in Gmail IMAP implementation. In this brief blog-post, we will explore two bugs that we’ve reported to Google, but which Google seems to have little interest in fixing.

Inconsistency between SELECT and CREATE

The first bug might not be very juicy but it took us a while to recognize it. What we first thought was a bug in our system turned out to be a bug in GIMAP. As it turns out, in GIMAP, SELECT is case sensitive, while CREATE is not. Here’s a brief example to illustrate the bug:


0001 SELECT "INBOX/Sales Invoices"
0001 NO Unknown Mailbox: INBOX/Sales Invoices (Failure)
0002 CREATE "INBOX/Sales Invoices"
0002 NO Folder name conflicts with existing folder name. (Failure)


In this case, there is already a folder named ‘INBOX/Sales invoices’, but since SELECT is case sensitive, and CREATE is not, we were unable to select the folder and with an upper case ‘I’ and at the same time unable to create the folder.

We first encountered this bug when a user migrated from a case sensitive IMAP server to Gmail. Hence we could have two folders named ‘foo’ and ‘Foo’ without it being any problem until we tried to copy those to Gmail.

Rejection of random messages

The next bug is of far more serious nature and it is a bug that we run into everyday. We’ve spent a significant amount of time trying to narrow down this problem, but almost entirely without luck. What happens is that GIMAP decides to reject certain emails. Sometimes the upload works when retrying later, sometimes not. To make this even more interesting, GIMAP can reject emails that it just gave us. For instance, let’s say we’re copying messages from [email protected] to [email protected]. Even that a GIMAP just gave us a particular email, another GIMAP server rejects the same email. Strange, isn’t it?

When I said that we’ve spent a serious amount of time trying to narrow down the problem, I was not kidding. We’ve done statistical analysis on tens of thousands of messages trying to find some kind of pattern (including trying to find a correlation between the content in the header and the body), and still no luck.

That said, the failure rate is quite low. Out of all the messages we upload, only a small fraction gets rejected (a quick database query reveals that it’s currently at 0.04%). And if a message gets rejected, we clearly state what message we failed to upload in the Transfer Report that we send out to our customers upon completion.

In Google’s defense, they do state that they do not officially support ‘upload of messages,’ but that is a quite weak argument, as pretty much any other IMAP-enabled service on the market supports this. Not to mention that without APPEND, simple drag and drop operations may fail in email programs.

For the curious geeks reading this article, our software does comply with RFC 3501, as well as other related RFCs.

As a side note, we’re not the only ones experiencing the APPEND bug. The Google Group discussion for Gmail IMAP and POP is full with threads regarding this. The only official-looking response given multiple times by wár17 § is to upload in small batches as you otherwise is likely to hit the bandwidth limit. However, we can testify that this is not the case as the number of messages and the size of the mailbox seem to have little effect. We’ve had this problem with small mailboxes (<10 messages and only a few hundred bytes) and at the same time had mailboxes that exceed several Gigabytes running through flawlessly.

Update: While it seems like the rejection of emails is somewhat random, there are certain emails that are more likely to get rejected. The other day we ran a transfer of a folder including 600-something bounced messages. They were all rejected.

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Convinced yet? If so, just head over and sign up right away.

We are really excited to announce that YippieMove now offers both volume discount and custom migrations. Let me explain how these two things works and how it affects you.

Volume Discount

In order to qualify for a volume discount, you obviously need to migrate more than one account. We’ve decided that five accounts is a reasonable number to start offering volume discounts at. However, if you’re interested in migrating a larger number of email accounts, we are willing to work with you to make your migration as easy as possible.

Custom Migration

First, let me explain what we mean by custom migration. Normally, YippieMove integrates seamlessly with Gmail / Google Apps. However, with our custom migration, we enable you to migrate your email between virtually any two email servers (assuming they both support IMAP).

Since this is a custom migration, we can unfortunately not offer this service for single account migrations. However, we do offer volume discounts on custom migrations too.

For questions regarding volume discount and custom migrations, please contact our sales team.

One more thing…

Since last post we’ve kept adding more providers. As of this very moment, the number of providers we now support has exceeded 90. That’s quite a few. You would imagine that we would be satisfied with that numbers, but you’d be wrong. We will keep on adding more providers.

We know, we should post updates more frequently here at PWW about our work (and about technology in general). To our defense, we’ve been busy working on improving YippieMove. So what have we been up to?

Since our last post, we’ve added many more pre-configured profiles. At the time I’m writing this, the current number of pre-configured providers has reached 63! Keep in mind that this is only the number of pre-configured providers – any IMAP service may be used. We think that’s pretty impressive. To take a look at the list of supported providers, go to the About-page on YippieMove.

What’s even more exciting than the long list of supported providers is the improvements we’ve made under the hood. In order to improve the speed and flexibility of YippieMove, we have made significant changes to the back-end. With these changes, we have cut the transfer time in half (or even more in some cases). With the help of this new back-end, we were also able to improve the information passed on to the user about current jobs on the status-page.

In addition to more providers and an improved back-end, we’ve also worked hard on writing documentation related to our service and other problems related to e-mail migration. One of the problems that people who migrate their email is facing relates to how to migrate all their contacts. Because of this, we’ve compiled a guide on how to cope with this problem. Our guide includes a steps-by-step instructions on how to export and import the contacts for some of our most popular providers. Note that even if your particular provider is not listed, it’s quite likely that by reading though our instructions, you will be able to figure it out.

If you haven’t already checked out YippieMove, please go ahead and do so. A great place to start is to take a look on our screencast on how to use the service.