Exporting Thunderbird Emails to GMAIL

Most people tell you to copy the ".eml files from Thunderbird to Outlook Express then export to Outlook and go from there but it is actually possible to directly drag and drop between them within Thunderbird! I did see mention of tools that "forward" the emails to gmail, but I wanted to keep the original header details.

The basic steps (I used Thunderbird 2.0.0.23):

1. Set up an IMAP connection within Thunderbird (more info here).
2. I created a new gmail label called "ExportedFromThunderbird".
3. I clicked "Get Mail" with loaded all the labels from gmail
4. You can now drag individual messages onto the label. If you drag folders it looks like a subfolder within Thunderbird but it actually creates a new gmail label based on the "base" label.

The copying can be very slow and it can stall, I restarted Thunderbird a number of times, may pay to update to the latest before migrating!