Night Dreaming (by Sudar)

I am one of the early adapters of Gmail and I simply love it. I could still remember how excited I was when I received an invite from my friend Sumod.

A couple of months back I signed up for Google Apps and have set it up in my domain. It’s really cool to have a personalized email address yourname@yourdomain.com which you can have control over instead of having a generic email address like yourname@gmail.com. If you are still not convinced then read this article from lifehacker.

But then I found it very difficult to maintain two different accounts. For some time I was redirecting the mail that I receive in my Google Apps account to my Gmail account and also setup a custom from address to my Google Apps email address. But it was not looking good in some email clients like outlook, which exposed the customized from address. This made me to search for ways to migrate all my emails from Gmail to Google Apps. I have been using my Gmail account for nearly three and half years and have accumulated nearly 2.5 GB of mail.

Finally I found gXFER which actually worked and now all my old emails are backed up in my Google Apps account. So even if you want to move your emails from one Gmail account to another or to a Google Apps account or vice versa then follow these steps.

First, you need to add the Google gadget which is available in gXFER homepage to your Google personalized home page.

Now click the “Start Migration Online” link which is present in the new gadget which you have added to your Google personalized homepage (iGoogle).

Enter your Gmail account information and Google Apps account information and then click start.

If you get this screen then you are done. The migration is started and all your emails from Gmail will start to appear in your Google Apps account, but it might take very long time depending upon your inbox size. For me it took around 3 days for the complete transfer. The transfer rate is around 100 messages per hour.

The following are some of the points which I noted when my emails were migrated.

• As I said above the transfer rate is very slow, only 100 messages per hour. So it could easily take up days if your inbox size is big.
• All your contacts will be transferred without any problem.
• All the labels and filters that you have created will be transferred. If you have set up a filter to automatically assign a label to a message then it will work. But if you have explicitly assigned a label to a message then it will not be transferred.
• Messages present in the following labels will not be transferred Chats, Spam and trash.
• Your drafts will not be transferred.
• Messages will not be stared automatically, which means all your staring will be lost.
• If any of your attachments is infected with virus then those messages will not be transferred.
• The process appears to be stopped sometimes but actually it is not stopped and works but very slowly.

Once you have set it up, you can enable mail notification in Google Talk and then sit back and watch it as your messages gets transferred to your Google Apps account.

Happy emailing 🙂