Upload local Thunderbird email to Gmail

I had almost 30,000 old emails in Thunderbird dating back to 1996. Now that I've been completely converted to The Way Of Gmail, I want all my mail there. I figured it would be a piece of cake seeing as how Thunderbird was the geek email client of choice and that mbox is a very standard mailbox format. Wow, was I wrong. Here's what I tried:

1. imapsync. Only does imap-to-imap transfers.

2. Ryan Grove's ruby script. Doesn't work for Thunderbird mailboxes. I asked, and the response was "This script can’t read Thunderbird mailboxes. It should be possible to write a script that can read them (I believe Thunderbird uses an Mbox-like format), but I don’t plan to do it." He launched "Larch" in the last couple of days which does imap-to-imap transfers; seems like that could be very useful oneday.

3. Scott Yang's python script. Works for maildir mailbox format, not Thunderbird. I asked, and the response was "I do not know whether it works with Thunderbird mailboxes, however I do not think it would be too hard coding a solution for it. Working on Windows might take a bit of effort. Basically it’s not tested :)"

4. Google Email Uploader. Only works with Google Apps Gmail accounts, i.e. not normal foo@gmail.com accounts.

5. Google Email Uploader + foo@bar.com + forwarding. I happen to own my own domain--let's call it bar.com and a Google Apps site for that domain. That means I can have people send mail to me at foo@bar.com and it goes to my Google Apps Gmail account. I only use the Google Apps account to forward my mail to my normal gmail account foo@gmail.com. So I simply used Google Email Uploaded to push the mail to foo@bar.com and from there it got forwarded to my normal gmail account. WRONG. Forwarding caused the dates to get set to the current day, not the original day.

6. Manual IMAP push. At this point I got a little discouraged and decided to do things manually: setup gmail to provide IMAP access, then drag and drop my emails up to gmail in Thunderbird. This turns out to work, but it is Painful if you have a lot of emails. The transfers often fail, so you have to do them in small groups. Even worse, there seems to be a rate limit on uploading so eventually gmail will lock you out of IMAP for a period of time!

7. Google Email Uploader + foo@bar.com + pop3. This actually worked. What I did was instead of using forwarding, I enabled pop access on foo@bar.com. Then in foo@gmail.com I added foo@bar.com to the "Get mail from other accounts". SUCCESS. A couple of points:

- I don't think you need to buy your own domain to use Google Apps which is necessary to use Google Email Uploader. If that is true, this is a no cost solution. If someone can verify this and post a comment it would be great.
- Some of my emails get munged together. I'm not sure who is at fault: Google Email Uploader, foo@bar.com or foo@gmail.com.