Tired of having messages sent on behalf of me from gmail, I recently set up Google Apps for Your Domain. This gives me that sweet gmail interface on my own domain. Everything is great but for the two years worth of archived mail is left behind on my old account. Sure, if I am looking for something, I can just log onto the old account. That is only a little inconvenient and the need for accessing old stuff should diminish over time, but I really want all my mail in one spot.
So, I set off to find a way to transfer all of this archived mail over to the new account. I threw out the most obvious choice immediately: Forward everything. That screws up the dates on all of the forwarded messages and makes it look like I sent all of them. The other method involves a few steps:
- Enable POP access on the old account
- Download all of the messages to your PC with some mail client
- Use some utility to upload everything to the new gmail account. There are a few utilities freely available that will handle this job:
- mailredirect* is a plugin for Mozilla Thunderbird that will redirect all mail to another account with the original mail headers intact.
- Mark Lyon’s Google Gmail Loader (GML) will load up a gmail account keeping the original “from” addresses.
- gExodus will accomplish the same thing as GML
- Organize all of the newly imported email. There does not seem to be a way to get around this step. gExodus allows one to add some prefixes to the subject lines of the imported email that should help in the organizational task. It would be nice to get the all of gmail’s labels to carry over to the new account, but that does not seem possible at this time.
* mailredirect is not built especially for importing to gmail like the other two utilities are. So, if one was to use mailredirect, they might want to get that set up and working before downloading all the messages from the old account.
There is another alternative that might prove to be easier than the above mentioned steps. Google has added a feature that allows one to check mail from other accounts in gmail. This could be used to eliminate steps 2 & 3 above. Unfortunately, this feature is only enabled on a few gmail accounts; mine is not one of them.
After about 30 seconds of thought, I decided to wait for Google to enable this new feature on my account rather than go through the download/upload routine. If for some reason the 100% gmail method doesn’t work. I’ll probably try mailredirect.