The email address you chose when signing up for Gmail seemed completely hilarious when you first signed up, but after a year of sending resumes to employers from strangelove45@gmail.com, you may be reconsidering your choice. Luckily with Gmail’s easy-to-use Mail Fetcher feature and POP3 access, you can easily import all of your old emails to your new, respectable Gmail address with a few very simple steps. Here’s how it works:

First, login to your old account and go to Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP. In the POP Download section choose to enable POP for all mail and then save your changes.

After you do that, you’ll have a new option in the POP Download section to Enable POP for all mail. Since you want to import every piece of mail into your new account, you want to select this option and again save your changes.

Now it’s time to import all of those messages into your new email account. Log out of your old account and then log in to your new Gmail account. This time go to Settings -> Accounts. In the Get mail from other accounts section, click on Add another mail account. Just step through the setup (the screenshot above is actually importing from my Google Apps Lifehacker Gmail account, but the settings are basically the same for a regular Gmail import) and you’re done. Now it’s just a matter of waiting. Gmail will use the POP access you set up on your old account to download every single message in your old account to your new one. When it’s done, all your old emails will be instantly searchable from your new, non-lame email address. If you ever get wistful for your old account, you can always associate that address with your new one and send email from it whenever you want.

Once the initial POP import completes, you may want to consider heading back to your old account and disabling the POP access in favor of turning on forwarding of all new mail, also available in the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab of the settings. This will ensure that all new mail sent to your old address will get there as soon as it’s received.

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Mac OS X Leopard only: You wouldn’t think that Leopard’s new Quick Look feature would work anywhere but from Finder, but you’d be wrong. From the command line in Terminal, you can invoke Quick Look to preview the contents of a file. Tips web site Mac OS X Hints details how: the command is qlmanage -p somefile where somefile is your document. As Mac OS X Hints recommends, setting up an alias (qlf, perhaps?) is a good way to save your typing fingers when reusing this technique.

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We’ve already seen many different ways to use Twitter for recreational or informational use, but weblog academhack has shown how Twitter can be extended to academic use. When assigning his students to learn how to use Twitter, Professor Dave Parry observed that class chatter went well beyond the classroom and built stronger student communities. He also mentions that since Twitter forces you to express your thoughts within 140 characters, it can improve one’s grammar skills. Based on this character limit, Twitter also helps establish rules for effective communication. It’s also a great way to follow someone famous (presidential candidates come to mind) or a professional whose interests align with yours. Have you used Twitter for your coursework and academic well-being? What are your findings? Share your secrets in the comments.

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