Google Drive

Now that the firm has retired Gmail, we are also leaving  all the other features included in Google's G Suite.  Aside from email, the most commonly used feature is Google Drive.

The firm has determined that it will NOT be converting the contents of Google Drive to Box.  Too many people have too much junk in Drive that is not necessary to bring into Box.

That said, if you have information in Google Drive that you want to save, you have several options.  First, if you only have a small number of files, you can download them yourself.  You can download a file for older from your Google Drive and convert it to Microsoft format if currently in Google format.  This will allow you to continue to work on the documents using another program.

If you are using Google Drive (which includes Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides) to extensively to download a few documents yourself, Google also offers an option called Google Takeout.

Takeout allows you to download the entire contents of your Google Drive, or select features.  It will also convert your Google files to a convenient format.  If you want to use Takeout, do the following:

1. Go to https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
2. Click on "Select None" to turn off all the various Google features.  
3. Scroll down to Google Drive and select only that category.
4. If you don't want to download everything, click on "all files" and then on "select files and folders".  Check only those folders you want to download.
5. Scroll to the bottom and hit "next"
6. You then have the option to select different save formats.  The default "zip" is probably best.  You can also create a maximum size.  I recommend selecting a very large size.  This will ensure everything goes into one download file instead of multiple ones.  
7. Click on "start download"
8. Depending on how many files you have selected, Drive can take minutes or hours to complete. When it has created the download file, you will get an email with a link.  Use that link to download your files.
9. That should be it for now.  Save that zip file in a safe place.  You can open it if you need to use any of the files now.  Otherwise, hang onto it until you go live on Box.com.  Then, you can upload the files into Box.

Of course, if you need assistance, contact the help desk.  We are a little overwhelmed these days, but if you send us an email, we will get your request on our task list and get to you as soon as possible.

Please do not put off this task for too long.  When Google shuts down, we will no longer have access to this data and will not be able to retrieve it.  Google will only remain available for a few more weeks.  It will be going away before most of our offices are up and running in Box.  That is why it is important to save the documents locally before we can make them available to you in Box.

Changing Your Outlook

We are still on schedule to move to a new email service over Labor Day Weekend.  We will be bidding goodbye to Google's G Suite and moving to Microsoft's Exchange Online.

For the past few weeks, we have been  migrating your mail, contacts, and calendars to the new system.  This process is still ongoing.

Outlook Users

If you already use Microsoft Outlook for your work email, you are currently connecting to Google Mail to receive and send messages.  We will need to point Outlook to Microsoft's system at the appropriate time.  To facilitate this, we have a program called Outlook Assistant.  You can download and install this program now, and it will point your Outlook program to the new system at the appropriate time.

This week, you will receive an email with a link to download Outlook Assistant.  When you do so, you may be asked to create a password.

IMPORTANT: This will change your password for the Office 365 Portal.  If you already know your Office 365 password and want to keep it, simply enter that password.  If you don't know your password or want to change it, this will give you the opportunity to reset it.  This password must have at least 8 characters, both upper and lower case letters, and numbers.  Please remember what your password is.  If we have to change it before the migration is complete, your Outlook conversion will not work properly.

Once you enter a password, simply download and run the executable.  Once this is installed, you will not see any changes.  The program will wait until we tell it to make the switch to Exchange, then it will simply point your program to the new mailbox at the appropriate time.

If you do not install Outlook Assistant, you will no longer receive new emails once we cut over to the new system.

Non-Outlook Users

If you have not yet started using Outlook, and still rely on a web browser to get your mail, you will need to start going to a new web site for your mail.  Rather than going to gmail.com, your mail will start coming to outlook.office365.com.

This will be a new interface that looks a little different, but it will continue to provide browser based access to send and receive mail.

If you go to that web site now, you can see that most of your mail is already there.  Do not be concerned if some mail is missing.  We are still migrating mail, and your mailbox may not be complete.

IMPORTANT: Do not start sending mail from the Office 365 portal before the migration is complete, and do not make any changes to the mail in the new portal.  If you do, you will mess up the migration.  Do not delete messages.  Do not move them into folders. Do not try to send messages from there.  Do not make any changes at all.  You cannot start using the portal until the migration is complete.

If you want to begin using Outlook for your mail, but have not done so already, at this point I would recommend waiting until we make the final conversion.  At that point, you can simply run your initial setup of Outlook and begin using it with Microsoft Exchange Online.

Everyone

There will be some work to do once the migration is complete.  We are migrating your mail, contacts, and calendar.  You may lose some settings.  If you have filters set up to deal with messages, you will need to recreate those in Exchange.  If you have shared calendars with others, you will need to re-share them.  If you are using third party tools like Cloud HQ to share mail folders, those tools will no longer work.

Your labels/folders will move over, but going forward, you can only assign a message to one folder. If you have messages with more than one label during migration, they will be duplicated with a copy in each folder.

The exact timing of the final conversion to the new system is dependent on when the migration is complete.  Once we are confident of when that will happen, we will let everyone know the exact date and time of the cut-over.

Once cut-over is complete, there may be a short time when you still have access to your Gmail account, even though it will no longer be receiving any new messages.  This will give you a chance to confirm for yourself that everything moved properly.  However, once the migration is complete, you should not attempt to send messages from Gmail, nor make any other changes in the old system.

We plan to bring over the contents of your Google Drive to your personal Box folder.  Anything else you may use in Google that is tied to your work account (e.g. photos, chats, blogs, sites, etc.) will be gone once we shut down our Google account.

Cleaning out Mailboxes, Part 2

Based on user feedback from my first post on cleaning out mailboxes, I would like to pass along a few other ideas for clearing out space on your computer.

Removing Labels

When we moved to Microsoft's Exchange Online, any email that has two or more labels will be duplicated in the new mailbox so that one copy can go in each folder.  So, while removing multiple labels from your Gmail mailbox will not shrink its size now, doing so will prevent your new maillbox from greatly increasing in size.

One label that has become meaningless now is GW Archive.  This was a label that was set when we moved email from the old GroupWise system into Gmail years ago.  The GW Archive label indicated email messages that had been archived in GroupWise.  Most of those messages also had other labels associated with them to indicate where they should be filed.

To remove the GW Archive label from any email, open the GW Archive folder in your mailbox, use the check box to select all, then click on the link to select all conversations with that label.  Once selected,  you can click on the label icon and remove the check mark next to GW Archive.  This will strip the GW Archive label from all those emails, while leaving the messages themselves intact.  Of course, if you no longer want any of those very old messages, you could also opt to delete them, knowing that doing so will delete them from all labels under which they may be stored.

If you have other labels that you don't think you need any longer, you can use this same method to open other labels and strip that particular label from all emails.

Deleting Dictation

Many attorneys have been using outsourced dictation for many years.  Some of you have been saving all of the sent emails that you sent to the transcription companies, along with those large audio recording attachments.  This can be a great place to recover a large amount of mailbox space.

To find these, run the following search:

to:keystrokepro.com.

Once you find them, you can select all and delete.  If you are willing to delete the returned transcripts, you can search for from:keystrokepro.com.

Using the "to:" or "from:" ensures you only get messages to or from that address, not any email that references that name.

Of course, if you use a different transcription service, simply substitute keystrokepro.com with the other services name.

Conversation Mode

Be careful, if you have "conversation mode" turned on, these searches will show you all conversations where at least one email meets the search criteria.  If you delete all of these, it will delete the entire conversation.  That is probably ok, since it will simply be deleting forwarded recordings or transcripts.  Just be careful you know what you are deleting.

If you want to be sure you are deleting only the messages that fall into your search and not others in the same conversation,  you may want to turn off conversation mode temporarily.  To do that, click on the gear icon in the upper right hand corner of your inbox, and select "Settings".  In Settings, you should see a toggle switch  to turn off conversation mode.

Empty Trash

Of course, once you are done with your deletions, be sure to empty your trash.  Otherwise all your deleted mail will remain in trash for 30 days and will still need to be migrated.  Just be sure you want to delete what you are deleting.  Once you empty trash, you can no longer recover those messages.

Cleaning Out Your Mailbox

As we move our email system from Google to Microsoft, we bid adieu to the unlimited storage space that we have in Google.  Microsoft limits mailbox size to 50 GB.  While this is more than enough for most, it will be important once again to keep mailbox bloat under control

The firm also now recommends using MS Outlook on your computer, as opposed to using the simple online interface we had in Google.  Microsoft Exchange Online will also offer an online interface. However, some of the other systems the firm is adopting need to use the good old fashioned Outlook program on your computer.  Unlike more modern web based email, Outlook performance will be impacted by having particularly large mailboxes.  This is another reason to remove the bloat.

A third reason for cleanup is that our migration from Google to Microsoft will go much faster and more smoothly the smaller the mailboxes are than we need to move.  So if at all possible, please clean out your mailboxes.

Search Your Archives:

First, look for archived emails.  Many mail programs, particularly on your phones, have often archived mail that you thought you were deleting.  You may want to check and see if this is the case, by looking for archived mail in your mailbox.

To search only for archived email, run the following search in the Gmail search bar:

has:nouserlabels -in:Sent -in:Chat -in:Draft -in:Inbox

Be careful though, if you have "conversation view" turned on, you may still see some email that is not archived as Google will show you all conversations in which any one message within that conversation was archived.  Select the messages you want and delete them.

Search for Large Attachments

Most individual emails take up almost no space.  A plain text message is usually less than 5kb in size.  You could save millions of them and never fill your mailbox.  What takes up your space are large attachments and pictures.  Google allows for attachments of up to 25 MB in size.  A mere forty emails like this would use up 1 GB of storage space.  A single email with a 20 MB attachment takes up as much space as 10,000 short text emails of 2 KB each.

To search for these particularly large emails, I recommend doing a search by mail size.  For example, if I wanted to search for all of my emails larger than 20 MB, I would run the following search in the Gmail search bar:

larger:20m

I recommend searching for 20 MB and larger files.  If you don't find very many search for larger:15m, or larger10m, or even larger 5m to see all the larger files.  Delete those you do not need.

Search for older messages

Some of us have email messages going back decades.  Many of these may be for closed cases that we never want to review again, or maybe just old notes about going to lunch or taking a personal day back in 2003.  You can look for older messages by using the following search in Gmail:

Older_than:10y

That would show you all messages older than 10 years.  You could, of course change it to search for mail older than 5 years with: Older_than:5y.

You can also search by date.  For example, if your wanted to find anything sent or received before January 15, 2010, you would run the following search:

Before:2010/01/15

Specific Senders:

Perhaps you get mail from someone you are sure you never want to see again.  This is a great way to isolate all that junk mail from Amazon.com or linkedin.com

You can search for certain senders.  For example, if you wanted to search for every message you received from linkedin.com, you would search for:

from:linkedin.com

This will only show  you emails from that domain, not emails in which you happened to reference the domain in the text of your email.

Another good trick is to search for:

from:noreply

A great many junk mail senders use "noreply" in their from address.  This is a quick and easy way to find and delete them.

Combination Searches

You can run any of the above searches in combination with each other.  For example, if you want to see all emails larger than 10 MB and older than 3 years, you would search:

larger:10m AND older_than:3y

Deleting Mail:

Once you have your search results, you must select all the messages and then click on trash to send them to trash.  Your page shows you only a limited number at a time.  The default is 50 messages, while the maximum you can see on one page is 100 messages.

However, if you are really sure you want to delete all the messages you have found in your search, and don't want to look at the whole list, you can do the following:

Click on the box just above the list to select all the messages on that page.  When you do, another line will appear just above the first checked message.  It says: "All 100 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations that match this search." If you click on the underlined part, it will select all emails that match your search on subsequent pages without you having to scroll through each page.  Once you have selected the messages, simply click on the trash can icon to delete everything.

Remove Labels

Although multiple labels do not increase the space you use in Google, Microsoft does not allow you add more than one label to an email.  If you have assigned multiple labels to an email, our migration process will duplicate the email so that it can be stored in multiple folders.  This doubles the amount of space each email takes (or triples if you have three labels on one email).

If possible, you may want to consider removing multiple labels from emails.  You will not be able to use multiple labels going forward.  Removing them from existing emails will help reduce your footprint.

Empty Your Trash and Spam:

Now I know this advice goes directly against what I have been telling everyone for years.  When you delete something, it sits in your trash for 30 days, then disappears forever.  I have long strongly recommend you allow everything to sit in trash for 30 days before it goes away.  Once it is gone from trash, you cannot recover it.

However, in this case, I must ask that you empty your trash.  If not, the migration tool will pull over all the messages you put in trash, thus defeating the purpose of cleaning up you mailbox.  Just please, please, PLEASE, make sure you really want all those messages to disappear forever before emptying trash.

While you are at it, if your mailbox is like mine and has thousands of messages in your spam folder, you may want to empty that as well.  Google deletes spam after 30 days, but there may be thousands of spam messages in there every little bit helps in reducing the load for migration.