Gmail Emoji – How to Save and Use Emoticons in Other Apps

If you can import the EML files into a mail client that support IMAP this will be easy.

It seems that Thunderbird can do this, but I'm not 100% sure. (Don't have a local copy to play with.)

Anyway, set-up Thunderbird to be an IMAP client for Gmail. (Lifehacker has an excellent guide to do this.)

Then, import your EML files into Thunderbird.

If necessary, move them to a temporary folder (called "Zimbra" perhaps) which will be a label in Gmail. Then just wait for IMAP to sync them all to the cloud.

After that you can delete Thunderbird, keep it around to make local archives of your e-mail, or keep using it as your main client.

I was able to do this a couple of years ago with thousands of messages from my Pegasus Mail client. (There was some pain in converting to a format that Thunderbird could read, but getting the messages into Gmail was the easy part.)

I found the problem in the import. There were about 3000 contact records. Around contact number 2900 I found there was an email field (that Google had exported) that contained eight (!) email addresses, separated by commas.

When I removed that record, Gmail imported the whole file OK. Before that, the entire file was not processed, even though the other records were OK.

I leave this information here to help any future person who runs into the weird case that Gmail can't read a file that Gmail itself generated.

It is not enough to verify the field names are correct. The data itself may be bad and even Gmail can be the culprit. It was hard, painstaking work to find this particular devil so deep in the file.

Perhaps a Gmail dev will read this & decide to add some sort of feedback to the Import Contacts tool - it's a shame that it currently fails completely silently.