(my current mail solution is to use Eudora POP on my local machine, but forward all my mail through gmail for spam filtering and archiving and searchability; it's working pretty well finally).
Gmail does not offer any "import from local disk" options. Sigh. There appear to be a few ways to do this :
1. Change my gmail temporarily to IMAP. Get all my Eudora MBX's into an IMAP client (something like Outlook; perhaps requiring an MBX to PST conversion step or something). Open the IMAP client and connect to gmail; drag the mail from the Eudora boxes to the gmail boxes.
Should work in theory, but a bit scary, and extremely slow (moving mail on IMAP is ungodly slow).
(Also, when I switch back to POP, is it going to redeliver me all that mail that I just uploaded? That would double-suck.)
2. Make a POP server somewhere. Convert the mbx's to mbox's to maildirs and dump them on the POP server for it to serve up. Tell gmail to grab mail from that POP server.
One issue is where I could get a POP server with a public IP and admin access. The other is that any time I try to do networking stuff it's a massive fail of mysterious problems and no error messages.
3. Get a Google Apps gmail account (different from regular gmail account for unknowable reasons). Import MBX's to Outlook. Use "Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook" to import mail to Apps mail account. Use gmail fetcher to bring mail from apps-gmail to my normal gmail.
(similar alternative : get apps gmail. Convert mbx to mbox. Find a Mac. Use "Google Email Uploader for Mac" to upload the mbox. Transfer mail from apps-mail to normal mail).
(I could also use gmail API to write my own importer, but that also requires an Apps gmail, so may as well just use the existing importers in method 3)
It's all such a hassle that I'm once again tempted to just write my own damn email client. Sigh I wish I'd done that long ago, but it's always the local optimization to not do it. I'm so fucking sick of getting penis emails. Hello spam filterers, *penis* -> spam. You're welcome. And of course if I used my own email client, my private property (words) wouldn't be data-mined to serve me ads (you bastards).
(oddly gmail does remarkably well at spam detection on the cases that would be hard for me to do with simple filters; things like bank phishing mails that are designed to look exactly like legitimate mails from my bank; I don't think I could give that up, so I'd still be stuck with routing mail through gmail even if I had my own client).