Expresso Blog

Migrating over to Google Apps - including Sent items

I fell in love with Google’s email service as soon as I used it. When it first came out with the unseen 1 gb inbox, I knew Google was onto something. With the recent unveiling of Google Apps, it seems clear Google is on the right track of dominating online collaboration.

Google Apps brings Gmail to your domain. But one of the obstacles I found was migrating my data over for several of my domains. If you get the Premium edition of Google Apps, which costs $50 a year per user, you get Google IMAP migration tools. However, I don’t have $50 for every user, so I used a different - and free - approach.

I first thought of using POP to download all my emails, but there was a problem of not getting my sent items that were in the Sent item folder of my old host. So I thought of a quick workaround that solved my problem.

If you have IMAP and POP access to your current emails, simply log in to your IMAP account (using Thunderbird for example), move all your emails in the Sent items folder into your Inbox.
Then use Gmails ability to download POP email. Before you do, first create a label called “Old Sent Items” and a filter to tag all emails that have the From address as your email with the “Old Sent Items” tag. Then set up Gmail to connect to your current host using POP. You can set the email address as anything you want (in fact if you use the same address as your new Google Apps account, Gmail will complain, so put something different). Set the username/password and put the current mail server address, check off “Leave a Copy” if you want to keep your emails still at your old host, and watch as all your emails gradually begin to fill your inbox, INCLUDING your sent items. Your sent items won’t be placed in the actual Gmail sent items folder, but will be labeled with something similar because of the filter we just set up.

If you have thousands of emails, this may take a while so make sure Gmail reports that there are no emails left to download from the POP account before your delete your old email hosting and change the MX servers.

So there you have it - a cheap, free (albeit not perfect since Sent items won’t actually be placed in the Gmail folder) way to migrate your data over without losing anything.