Remember the sad days when creating books with your emails was only possible in some armchair futurist’s dream or Google’s rant on April fools?

We have decided to take the long route of developing the software that would allow anyone to rescue their messages from the digital recesses of the mail servers. One year down the road we have spoken with a lot of people, improved the machine substantially, conceived some further upgrades and even took the time to create some books of our own.

It is with an emotional tone that we celebrate the 1st of many Memeoirs anniversaries. Happy birthday!

Irreplaceable as in each Fitmemes production was the support given by Paulo Patricio, the graphic designer and eye behind the look and feel of our Memeoirs. Rumor has it that he’s working on new book layouts too!

The soundtrack was composed and performed by A Ghost Train, the solo music project of Fitmemes’ CTO and first engineer Paulo Pinto. He managed to capture the genuine spirit of the video. In his own word: “I try to be the most sincere I possibly can, otherwise it’s pointless”.

Last but not least, a very big thank you to the actors that participated to the filming of this video. Enjoy it!

Since the dawn of the human civilization, individuals have struggled to immortalize the interactions with their peers and the nature around them. Cavemen drew in walls what they believed to be their most valuable accomplishment: hunting the wild animals who provided the fuel for their families to survive. Fast forward a few thousand years and, in forgotten monasteries across the old continent, monks were copying thousands and thousands of pages of the manuscripts that contained the knowledge gathered throughout the millennia. Centuries later, their work would significantly be eased by the breakthrough of a single man, Gutenberg, who provided the human race with the most beautiful of concepts: machines making the world’s knowledge available to virtually everyone. In the meantime, letters were traveling the world, sent between lovers, family members, friends, enemies, strangers. Simple pieces of paper that contained the most raw of human emotions, kept like small treasures that immortalize a moment in time.

Then came the digital revolution. Suddenly, the envelopes that carried such dear words were being replaced with meaningless numbers, series of ones and zeros traveling across a web of pipes, jailed in the crushing complexity of the computer. Overwhelmed by the possibility of losing such important pieces of history, some people wondered what those monks would have done had they knew the contemporaries of the digital age, relying on the godly nature of the mighty computer, would throw to waste the years they put into typing all those lines of text. Would they still have done it?

Consequentially, posing as an inverted Gutenberg, a machine was built that takes those meaningless numbers and puts them as and where they should be: words on a piece of paper. Like letters in an envelope, emails in a book. Memeoirs, your emails, in a book. To make sure the words you crafted to your loved ones are kept for as long as the black of the ink beats the yellow of the paper.

First of all you will need a Gmail account. If you don’t have one yet, go here and sign up. Once you are into your Gmail account, click on the icon on the top-right of the screen and choose “Mail settings”.

You will find yourself into a control pannel. Click on the third tab, “Accounts and Import”. From this screen you will be able to initiate the import of your Hotmail account. Click on “Import mail and contacts”: a popup window will guide you through the import process.

You will be asked the basic credentials of your Hotmail account. We recommend to create labels (folders) to specifically separate your imported Inbox and Sent mailboxes: this will speed up the process later on when using Memeoirs to create your book.

The operation is absolutely safe, does not modify in any way your original Hotmail account and it requires just some time. It can take from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the amount of letters to be imported. Luckily the process runs in the background, so you are free to go while your account gets processed.

Once the operation is complete you can safely log in via Memeoirs to your Gmail account containing your Hotmail emails. Enjoy!

In this example we will import emails from Outlook Express to a Gmail account, however the logic is the same for every combination of desktop client and web mail provider.

Start by opening your Outlook client. You need to create a new IMAP account to connect to your Gmail account. In order to do that, select from the menu Tools → Accounts. Once you clicked on Add → Mail you will be asked to enter your account settings.

Email address is trivial. In the second screen, specify as account type IMAP, then insert in the first field “imap.gmail.com” and in the second “smtp.gmail.com” see the end of this post for other mail provider’s settings.

In the third screen it’s important to remember to insert as “Account name” the full email address. Now we need to configure this connection for special security:

Click on the newly created account, choose “Properties” and then select the tab “Advanced”. Here we need to tick “This server requires a secure connection (SSL)” for both IMAP and SMTP. Confirm and we’re done configuring. Now the fun part begins.

Suppose that you want to copy from Outlook all the correspondence with one person to your Gmail account. To do that, for each folder where the messages are, we will select the messages, right click on the selection, select “copy to folder” and then chose the destination folder.

A few notes:

• In order to make the selection easier, you can either shift + click for a broad selection or ctrl + click for cherry-picking items.
• You can sort by Name or Subject by clicking on the column name
• We highly recommend not to mix received and sent emails under the same destination folder/tag

Importing emails will take from a few seconds to several minutes depending on the amount of emails selected and the presence of large attachments. Once the operation is over, you will be able to connect to your webmail via Memeoirs and start the wizard. If you have questions or doubts don’t hesitate to contact us.

Our next post will show how to import emails from Hotmail, an even simpler task!

IMAP settings for everyone:

Gmail:
IMAP: imap.gmail.com
SMTP: smtp.gmail.com

Yahoo:
IMAP: imap-ssl.mail.yahoo.com
SMTP: plus.smtp.mail.yahoo.com

AOL:
IMAP: imap.aol.com
SMTP: smtp.aol.com

AIM:
IMAP: imap.aim.com
SMTP: smtp.aim.com

• Access to two new providers. We previously could access only Gmail and Yahoo. Now AOL and AIM were added to the list, bringing out of the box compatibility to dozens of millions of accounts.

• Support for imported accounts. It is now officially possible to create books out of emails that were imported from virtually any mail provider. A blog post explaining how to import emails into one of our supported providers, either via IMAP or via Gmail import feature, will follow shorty.

• Instantaneous preview of your book right from the browser. Behold the beauty of your exchanges in their new shape before bringing them to paper.

Go ahead and try out Memeoirs. Turn your letters with your loved one in an astounding gift. Read the story of your life from a book, rediscovering the best writings with your friends.

Power to your words!

We are very excited to bring you this: a new version of Memeoirs will be released online in a few days.

The good news is that we are expanding. The great news is that listening to your feedback we are making Memeoirs even easier and fun to use.

Other than the obvious overall improvements to our processing engine here’s what you will get:

• a faster, more efficient processing of the messages. Larger mailboxes took several minutes to be processed earlier on. Targeting solely what you are interested in, we are now able to deliver zooming speeds and consistent results.
  
• a larger selection of providers to choose from. We will officially support two more email providers from which you can directly connect from our interface.
  
• support of imported messages. This apparently trivial feature will enable support of virtually any email box in the world, granted that the emails are imported first on one of our supported providers. Tutorials on how to do that will follow shortly, but suffice it to say that it’s a simple and safe procedure that takes only a few minutes.

Plus much more! Stay tuned for our official release online.

We are searching for creative minds that master the video technique and that would like to team up with us to produce a beautiful video that will feature on the homepage of our site, and serve as a sweet introduction to the preservation of on-line communication that our service offers.

So, in case you are interested drop us a line on the comment section. Or if you know of anyone that might fit the profile, let them know.

During the Roman Empire the cursus publicus was the postal system that opened correspondences across the empire to rich citizens. Even though letters would travel in average 30 miles per day and paper was still a luxury good, lots of what we know about ancient Rome reached us through the copious production of epistles.

With the industrial revolution began an exponential acceleration. By the 20th century, air mail and accessible costs brought letters to the majority of the industrialized world. Manifestation of love, friendship and generally non-formal communication became common place inside the envelopes. Messages between pen pals proliferated across continents.

Then the Internet came. Email has been around for 45 years and in its actual form for about 28 years. What happened to letters in the past 15 years is similar to what went on with other media such as photography and video: an explosion in accessibility and use. Emails are ubiquitous and instantaneous and that very nature is in part responsible for its peculiar disorder. As of today about 97% of emails sent worldwide are “spam”.

Luckily Memeoirs takes care of that. Emails from contacts that you never wrote to are automatically discarded. And when you get to choose who to feature in your books, contacts are sorted by amount and size of emails exchanged. Even though a lot of time has passed since the first missives, nowadays people still seek to preserve their most beautiful and meaningful letters. Letters that exude personality, exchanges that narrate a story and epistolary connections are brought every day in the form of book thanks to Memeoirs.

The art of writing letters is still alive.

Both GMail and Yahoo! allow you to group messages together. In the case of Yahoo!, you can lump them by placing them under folders. For GMail you can use labels. So, in order to select which messages to publish, all you have to do is assign these messages to a folder / label. On the first step of the Memeoirs creation process you will be prompted to select the folders you want to have published. Simply select the one you use to group your messages, and you are good to go.

Here is an example using a GMail label called “Letters”.

Inside GMail, the "Letters" label

And here is how it looks on our wizard.

Selecting the right label

Now you can let your tailor-perfect self have some fun handpicking the most unforgettable messages!