(… or any other IMAP compatible mail client)
My wife wanted to change her Gmail account to reflect the fact that we’re now hitched. So I started doing some research online and discovered that there are a couple of methods being used: POP3 and IMAP. However, only one includes support for preserving your labels. (If you aren’t interested in using the label system, why are you using Gmail anyway?)
So, I’ll cover using the IMAP method. (What is IMAP?) It’s fairly straightforward, but can take a significant amount of time if you have thousands of messages. (My experience took a couple of days to move about 10,000 messages.)
All in all, it’s a pretty simple process…
Step 1.
You’ll need to configure both of your Gmail accounts for IMAP access. Start, by clicking the ’Settings´ link at the top right of your Gmail account.
Next, navigate to the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ menu and change the bottom-most setting so that IMAP is Enabled.
Step 2.
Download a mail client capable of supporting IMAP.
I tried both Thunderbird and Outlook 2007. I started off using Thunderbird, but felt that things were moving a little slowly. So I decided to give Outlook 2007 a try. I should have known better. It was about 10x worse, so I went back to Thunderbird. Perhaps there’s another mail client out there that will handle this better, but I doubt it.
You can get the latest version of Thunderbird here.
Step 3.
Configure your mail client for both of your Gmail accounts. There are instructions for both Outlook and Thunderbird here. (Pay close attention to the Port number settings as GMail requirements are specific.)
When starting Thunderbird for the first time, one of the Options will ask if you want to configure a GMail account.
Click the “Email account” option instead. *Do not select the “Gmail” option here.*
Step 4.
Launch your mail client and start copying.
But don’t try to copy it all in one shot.
You should notice that there are folders in your *old* account that correspond to the Label names you’ve been using. You’ll want to drag these folders from the old account to the new account.
If you have a significant number of emails corresponding to each label, this process can take some time. Also, it’s not uncommon for the mail client to crap-out half way through copying. (This is a real PITA, but is significantly less of an issue in Thunderbird than what I saw in Outlook.) If it does, look in the folder of the new email account and see how far along it made it. Then just go back to the old folder and select what remains. On particularly large folders you may have to do this a couple of times.
As for your Sent Items. Those are located inside the “Gmail” folder that was created. You can copy those just like you did for the other folders.
2 Comments
I tried this and found thunderbird 3 to “crap out” quite frequently. Even when I POP downloaded 10,000 messages to Local Folders and then tried to move them to the new account via IMAP, it would fail on random messages. And because thunderbird likes to *copy* all of the messages you tell it to *move*, it wasn’t getting anything done (it tries to copy all 10K messages first, then start deleting them from the old folder).
At this point, I’m hand moving them, a few hundred at a time, and looking for a better method to use with my clients, who have much more email than me.
I have created a simple web interface that does all the migration in our VPS much faster. Give it a try here (feedback appreciated!):
https://apps.improffice.com/migrationbeta/