Microsoft Exchange to Gmail Migration with IMAP

(Yes, an update. I know it’s been a while, but I will try to blog more regularly.)

While I understand Google had to do a lot behind the scenes to ensure that actions mapped into Gmail properly, it has been a long wait for long-time Gmail users like me to get IMAP support in Google’s mail product. I’ve been using Microsoft Exchange for email for a while, but with my reshuffling of jobs, I found I no longer need the advanced features that it provides. Instead, with the new addition of IMAP access (a necessity in my books), I decided to save myself the money on Exchange and switch to Google Apps, and as such, back into Gmail.

This decision left me with a conundrum – how to get my bank of email out of the clutches of the MS empire and into the supposedly less evil Gmail. While my mailbox is not the largest around, weighing in at around 2GB, this was still a daunting task. IMAP support certainly made this easier, but finding the right application to do the move proved difficult.

I tried Outlook 2007 itself, Mozilla Thunderbird, Entourage, and Eudora with varying success, from Outlook’s constant timeouts on the IMAP connection, to Thunderbird ending up with messages without subjects or senders due to Exchange mangling headers. The solution came from an unlikely source: Windows Mail.

Windows Mail is the replacement to Outlook Express in Windows Vista, and was able to import email directly from the Exchange server through Outlook, then upload it to Gmail through IMAP. While the process was slow (around 10 hours for all my email), it managed to get the job done perfectly, without any timeouts and with the complete messages intact. I did not expect much from Windows Mail, but it pulled through in the end, and if Thunderbird wasn’t so damn good, I would consider using it as my full-time email client.

I now have Thunderbird with the Lightning calendar plugin syncing to my Google Apps Gmail and Google Calender, complete with all my email and calendar entries from Exchange. I still fire up Outlook and use the wonderful RemoteCalendars to pull down my Google Calendar for syncing with my iPhone and other devices, but other than that I am totally satisfied with the free alternative to Exchange.

November 4, 2007 10 Comments , , , , , , , , , , ,

  • http://www.digitm.com Auz1111

    Hi, that is nice to know, but a tutorial or a little instruction on how you went about doing this would be awesome!

  • http://www.pantsland.com Brad Kellett

    I’ll see what I can do, but once I nailed what applications would do the job, it really was just an act of following the import wizard in Windows Mail then dragging and dropping folders from the local folders in Windows Mail to the associated Gmail lables in the Gmail account.

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  • Louis

    Hi, I’m trying to do exactly what you did – migrating email messages from an imap server to google.

    I pretty much get what you were doing, except for one part. You said that from Outlook you uploaded it to Gmail through IMAP. How do you that exactly since Gmail’s Mail Fetcher doesn’t do IMAP?

    Thanks.

  • http://www.pantsland.com Brad Kellett

    Louis: You don’t use Gmail’s Mail Fetcher, you just set up both your email accounts as IMAP ones in Outlook, then just drag and drop the folders.

  • Adam

    Brad – can you elaborate a bit? I’m trying to get my Outlook mail to come to my Gmail account. From what you wrote above, it seems possible. Could you give step by step instructions on how to do it? Thanks!

  • Tom C

    So this doesn’t actually sync up gmail with outlook? It just copies all of the old emails over.

  • joseph croisant

    i’ve been trying to migrate ms exchange emails to gmail, and i keep seeing the (unknown sender) . . .

    is that a prob with exchange?

    do you think i could fix this by using windows mail to migrate the data?

    i am pulling my hair out, and i am getting no help from google’s support . . .

  • KetanS

    I know this is an old blog but this info is still useful and wanted to let people know that this is a solution for a problem that Google hasn’t dealt with.

    If you used Outlook to create a PST file and then imported that into Google Mail then you would end up with “(unknown sender)” in the From or To fields for messages to/from someone who is within your Exchange server domain.

    Using Windows Live Mail correctly migrates e-mails to Google Mail and preserves the e-mail address.

    You could also use Outlook to perform the same task.  Just add a new mail account to the Exchange Server but use IMAP as the type.  Now, use this IMAP connection as the source of the migration instead of the original native Exchange connected account and all the e-mail address will be preserved.

    To avoid/minimise problems with time-outs in Outlook, sub-divide large mail folders into smaller ones and migrate those one-at-a-time.  You can also increase the server timeout value in the advanced account settings although I haven’t really needed to do this.