Simplified Guide to Importing All Your Archive Email Into Gmail
Personal Productivity, SaaS October 24th, 2007
This is now so simple, it shouldn’t even require any guidance… but first things first.
Why would you want to import all your old email to Gmail? Because it gives you an All-In-One, searchable archive. I know there is real demand for this: my blog visitor log tells me, since my old post on the subject, How to Import All Your Archive Email Into Gmail still receives a good 5-600 readers every single day. That means:
- people do want to migrate to web-based software (Gmail)
- they don’t want to lose their historical “baggage”
- so far it has been rather complicated
Now that Gmail supports the IMAP protocol, everything’s changed. My most-popular-ever post is all of a sudden obsolete. Forget all the “Gmail-loader” tools on the Net, most of them did not work anyway, forget even my multi-step process… I’ll show you all you have to do now. I’ve tested these steps with Outlook, but they should work with Thunderbird or whatever your favorite desktop email software is.
- Enable IMAP in your Gmail account
- Setup the Gmail account in your client software, based on these instructions
- This will create a folder structure matching your Gmail labels
- Open your old archive.pst files, if any
- Drag-and drop all your old email into the Inbox folder in your new IMAP account.
-
- You can do this across accounts, or even archive files.
- If you don’t want to “move” old email out of the archives, use “copy” instead.
- Instead of Inbox, you can drop old email into any other Folder (create new ones if you like), to match the Gmail labels
- Drag-and drop all your old “Sent mail” into the “Sent Mail” folder in your new IMAP account.
- Wait patiently – with thousands of emails (my archive goes back to 1996) your upload bandwidth may be the bottleneck.
Voila! Your email is now up in Gmail, all labeled, searchable, with original sender info and dates intact (this was a problem with previous methods).
Happy Gmail-ing 
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Tags: email import, gmail, gmail archive, gmail import, IMAP, Outlook, thunderbird
Zoli Erdos
Good work, Mr. Erdos! You beat me to coming up with this trick on my own blog!
What if I have subfolders in my local Sent folder?
All they need now is native multiple signatures with auto signaturing based on send from address chosen
If they had that I’d switch….
[...] Gmail now supports IMAP – so for those of you who wants to change to a web only email solutions here is a list of instructions for getting your old mail out of your existing client and into [...]
@Ben Kepes: Multiple signatures would be very nice. Heck, HTML signatures (without resorting to Greasemonkey hacks) would be nice…
and how do I enable imap in gmail (dumb question I know!)
Thank’s for your useful guide. However, it seems not everyone has IMAP access yet. Google writes:
“We’re working hard to roll out IMAP access to all our users, but it’ll take about a week…You’ll know that IMAP is available in your account when the Forwarding and POP tab in your settings becomes Forwarding and POP/IMAP.”
Great post! I started this import last night before reading your post, knowing that there were probably a million other people doing the same thing.
One lesson learned from my end: rather than moving the folders, copy them. Moving them will create problems when (inevitably) the server looses its connection and you have to start over. Problems in the upload will also leave you with partial folders. Alternatively, do the process incrementally.
Great tips Karl! Importing one folder at a time is probably the way to go. Now as soon as Google gives me my IMAP, I’ll start importing. Probably one folder a day.
This certainly makes things much easier. I am having one problem though: when I copy my messages to the sent messages folder in Gmail, in the web interface, the recipient of the messages shows up as “me” rather than the name of the person that the message was originally sent to. Anybody else having this problem? Any thoughts on how to solve it? Thanks.
Better to copy emails to the “All Mail” folder than to the Inbox. I’ve read them all anyways, so no need to clutter my inbox.
Question for Zoli or anyone else – when I compose mail in outlook 2007 it sits in the outbox of my personal folder. The only way I can get it to send is to move it to the drafts folder of my imap and then go into gmail online and click on drafts and send it – how do I make email automatically send through IMAP (and yes the only acount I have set up n outlook is my imap one) any clues>>>>>
[...] that often.. ), but I’m still very excited about that. I’ve already tried to copy my old sent mail from my former account, but so far I’ve had problems authenticating. I think it’s got something to do with [...]
Ben: Google left out a setup step in their directions for Outlook 2007. In the Account Settings, I had to turn on “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication”, and set it to log on using your normal username (name@gmail.com) and password. Worked for me anyway.
Thanks for the great post!
Pavel
I noticed that it is possible to enable IMAP only in certain languages. If my language in gmail was set to hungarian, simple there was no menu to switch it on. But in english language of course it was there…
Here is the tricky question!
I am using thunderbird in POp with gmail – and want to switch to imap. I have TONS, tons of folder, sub folder … all neatly organized.
1/do you know if by drag and dropping my folder, gmail will automatically create a label for online ?
2/ what happen to the mail in the folders ? they will doubled up in gmail ? (i chose the option of keeping my mail online while using pop -we never know!)
Sebastien
Is there any way I can move my “Sent” messages from Yahoo! Mail (free) into the “Sent” folder at Gmail?
Hmmm, will the new IMAP functionality allow me to transfer an old Gmail account to my new Google Apps account?
I simply used Gmail’s Mail Fetcher for that. Some people report Mail Fetcher does not allow Gmail accounts to be the source, but I haven’t experienced that.
I guess if you can’t set Mail Fetcher up, you could always use the IMAP trick, basically making an offline email client the middleware.
great idea about using the offline email client in the middle between my Gmail and Google Apps account. I think IMAP will let me keep the original dates on my Gmail mails that I move over. I was told that Mail Fetcher doesn’t keep the original dates on mails that are moved.
Mail Fetcher *does* keep the original dates, but label information would be lost that way.
Now I’d like to use Gmail’s spam filter to process my “All Mails” (or “historical baggage”
) again…
I just transferred my mail from my Google Apps account to a Gmail account (I wanted to use the new Gmail features!). You were write, Mail Fetcher would keep the dates but I would lose all labels that I put on manually. But by setting up both accounts in IMAP, and dragging mail from one account to the other, I was able to keep all the labeling intact. Very nice!
I have an account with Gmail my hard drive crashed and now I am accessing my acct through the internet. I would like to transfer and set up my account on our lap top.
I am nervous about the transfer and how to go about it.
lost in gmail and picassa.
Wendolyn Nicholds
The IMAP import into Gmail works really well apart from some emails that were originally received through MS Exchange and then exported as .PST and imported into Thunderbird.
Those appear in Gmail with subject “(no subject)” and from “(unknown sender)”. When they’re opened, the content is there but is prefixed with the entire mail headers beginning with “Microsoft Mail Internet Headers Version 2.0″.
The emails all show up correctly again in Thunderbird if they’re copied back off Gmail over IMAP. So I guess it’s a problem with Gmail.
Anyone else seen this?
I don’t know about anyone else here – but I am unable to do this. whenever I try copying my 500mb folder structure from outlook into gmail via imap, my outlook crashes,
Any suggestions?
Gil- do it a few folders at a time and you should be fine
Doing that, and its marginally working – this is quite the pain. But I guess its worth it in the long run.
Thanks for the help
-Gil
I’ve got around 12000 emails an it took a day or so. I’m at the moment getting all my mail from one gmail account to another – that looks like it’s going to take a week or so!
[...] but that didn’t work. Now I found a great explanation and it worked!! Here’s the blog that explains [...]
Wow – worked perfectly. Thanks a bunch!
Does this work for AOL too? Where do I find these folders in my AOL? Could you write hits instruction in the simplest terms, assuming that I know nothing (almost true) but have a brain, so will learn!
I tried set up IMAP in Vista Winmail and the result was that one new folder showed up “gmail” below my local folders.
Not able to see any labels and was not able to drag and drop any emails to this new folder.
Any suggestions?
[...] I found lots of suggestions on the web, but not much that was too useful until I ran across a blog entry from Zoli Erdos which told me exactly what I needed to know. The key point is that Gmail, as of [...]
Nice, but dropped mail from archive folders, show up under a new timestamp when reading gmail online…
It looks like it sort of worked… I keep getting errors from Mail.app saying it cannot upload, and Gmail keeps crashing (preventing me from accessing my email). Is there any way to confirm that emails have transferred? Right now I have some emails transferred, but I have no way of knowing how many. The imap transfer idea seems right, but it doesn’t appear to actually work very well.
When I follow the procedure of dragging and dropping the email folders into the imap account folder in Outlook, and then click on the transferred email folder, the contents of the folder momentarily appear and then disappear permanently. The folder (label) shows up in my Gmail account, but also with no contents. Sometimes, however, with some folders, the contents remain, but most have this problem. Any ideas?
I also tried to upload my emails from Thunderbird (2.0.0.9, Linux) to Gmail by creating an IMAP account. The copy process works without any error message – but not all messages of a folder are copied. And I don’t see any rule behind which one is copied and which one not. So at the end I have the whole folder structure of Thunderbird in Gmail now, but instead of around 200 MB emails I only have around 70 MB. Every help is appreciated!
@Rondracur
when you import mail into gmail it will collapse messages into “conversations”. So if you had a back-and-forth with someone that created 10 messages and you imported it into gmail it may only count as one. This may or may not be why your count is off, just something to check.
OMG…is this good or what!!! I never know GMAIL support IMAP till I read this. And this have been fantastic! Now I don’t have to refer to 2 places for all my emails. GMAIL rocks! And thank you!
[...] Detailed instructions from where I got my help can be found on Zoli’s Blog. [...]
This was so helpful and everything worked like a charm. For those of you wishing to transfer old mail from Eudora to Gmail (instructions not currently listed on Gmail’s “supported IMAP client” page) here’s what to do:
Set up a personality for your gmail account with these details:
SMTP Server: SMTP.gmail.com
Check the “Authentication Allowed” box
Check the “Use Submission Port (587)” box
Select “Required, Alternate Port”
Incoming Mail: imap.gmail.com:993
Check the “IMAP” box
Select “Required, Alternate Port”
@Drew: Thanks a lot! That for sure I had in mind.
@all: So meanwhile I found three other reasons:
1. If you used Gmail via pop3 before switching to IMAP and deleted an email and now you want to upload exactly this email with a special label it won’t show up with this label/in the subfolder IF the deleted email is STILL in the Trash! So before uploading empty your trash!
2. Some subjects of emails are causing problems so the won’t be uploaded
3. The upload connection to Gmail breaks down after a punch of emails. At the beginning you can upload a few hundreds but after a while less and less … at the end only a few at the same time. -> Take a break and come back later/ another day.
This works great for using Gmail as an archive, but in real-time there is still a problem I’ve encountered.
I am using an MS Exchange server with Outlook 2003 as the client with a “redirect all mail to ‘my secret Gmail’ address” rule on all messages.
If Chris sends an e-mail to me and to Ed and copies Diana, Gmail only shows Chris as the sender and “my secret Gmail” address as the recipient. So even if I do “Reply to all” in Gmail, I only respond to Chris. Worse yet, I can’t even see in the header of the e-mail that Chris sent it to someone other than me.
I’ve found various add-ins for Exchange that address this, but they all seem to install on the Outlook client and require it to be running in order to work.
Anyone know how to get this working in Outlook 2003/Exchange based on server-side rules? Thanks.
I don’t know Exchange at all, but am really surprised, so far cases of forwarding I’ve seen show the original addressees, and the forwarding address (your secret account) does not become the adressee at all.
Hopefully some of the readers can jump in…
Do you know how to process if got “One or more parameter values are not valid”?
in my case the time stamp shown in the inbox (right of the snippet) is the date i uploaded the mail with IMAP. nevertheless, the opened email shows the correct date, when it was received. unfortunately, this date is used for sorting the mail, as well as for searches in the mail…
anyone any ideas?
I’m sorry, but I don’t follow this completely. By the instruction, “Drag and Drop all your old email into the Inbox folder in your new IMAP account,” just what do you mean? How do I do that?
Do I open Outlook 2003 and then open some other PST file rather than “Outlook.PST”? Which PST do I open, “Archive.PST” Can’t I just copy the contents of Outlook.PST to GMAIL? Just how do I do that? Perhaps an explicit step by step process would help me. Thanks.
I’m having the same problem as Robert re: how to drag and drop into my IMAP account. I’ve been fumbling around, trying to login to imap.gmail.com using FireFTP, but haven’t had any success.
In case there’s a better way, let me summarize what I’m trying to do. I just installed Office 2007 yesterday (new computer) and setup Outlook to access gmail but I must have set it up to use POP instead of IMAP because when Outlook downloaded my e-mails it deleted gmail’s copy. I want to be able to access my e-mails via Google’s web interface so now I’m trying to move the messages back to gmail. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.