I will have to move my Gmail files before it discontinues. The questions are where, how, when, where? I want to store thousands of old emails on the web and not on a computer. How? Iâd like to have a simple method. When? Should I wait for better options than are now available? Or make a choice and proceed soon?
In this excerpt from Answercast #57, I walk through a method for moving email from one online service to another.
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Gmail is staying around
Unfortunately, your question actually confuses me greatly. It implies that Gmail is discontinuing and itâs not. You donât have to move out of Gmail if you donât want to.
Thereâs nothing pushing you out of Gmail and Iâm not really sure why you are attempting to move to a different online service. So with that (simply questioning what youâre doing to begin with), letâs take a look at what some of the options are.
Moving Gmail
The options actually arenât very good. The problem is that moving a large body of existing email from one online web email service to another is almost impossible. Itâs certainly not easy.
The systems simply arenât set up to make it easy for you to transfer email from one system to another.
First download
The only approach that I can think of (and this is a stretch; youâre going to want to be careful about how you do this) is to:
- Get an email program like Thunderbird.
Yes, youâll need to use a program on a PC for this approach to work. You wonât have to use it long-term, but you will need to use it to transfer your email.
The IMAP protocol will actually download all of the email from Gmail to your machine. Thatâs gonna take a little while if youâve got a lot of email, but itâs important that you allow it to complete and that you get all of the email down from Gmail. It wonât affect anything on Gmail. (Thatâs the nice thing about IMAP. Itâs really sort of a window to the master repository of your email up on Gmail.)
- Once itâs done downloading, you would create a new account on some other service. (Iâll pick Yahoo at random, since I know we can do this there.)
- In Yahoo, you would set up your email address.
- Now in Thunderbird, you would set up another IMAP connection to Yahooâs email services.
So, that means that your Thunderbird (your email program on your desktop) would actually be sending and receiving email from Yahooâs servers; using IMAP to receive the email and POP3 to send it out.
- Now, what you would do is: on your PC, move (or drag and drop, or copy) all of the email from the folders that represent your Gmail account to the folders that represent your Yahoo account.
That will cause the email to be copied from one to the other. Because itâs IMAP, when you put something into a folder, it will get uploaded to the email service that folder is connected to.
I did a lot of this when I moved a bunch of my mail to Gmail; I moved a bunch of my sent mail up on to the Gmail servers in this fashion.
So, thatâs the best I can offer you. Once youâve finished the transfer, if you need to do that, you can stop using the desktop email program.
Downloading backs up
I strongly recommend you continue using the desktop email program if for no other reason than to back up your email, but, it is a technique that could allow you to transfer the bulk of your email from one service to another as long as both services support IMAP.
Transferring contacts
The one thing that it will not do, and the one thing that I simply have no easy way of transferring, is your contacts or your address book.
The best you can come up with in a situation like that is to export your contacts from Gmail (probably in a CSV file) and then use that file to import your contacts into either your desktop email program or your new email account on another web service, like Yahoo.
That automation that we have for email (that allows your desktop program to synchronize with whatâs going on on the web service) âŠthat kind of automation just doesnât exist in any clean form (or certainly not in any standard form) across all of the email services and desktop email programs.
So you have to get kind of tricky with that.
Gmail is not closing
Like I said, I donât know why you want to move from Gmail. Certainly, itâs not going to be discontinued any time soon. Millions of people are using it every day!
I believe the only reasonable way to transfer a large bulk of email from one email service to another is to use IMAP and a desktop program as the middleman.
Next from Answercast 57 â Why donât you partition your hard disk so that programs are on C and data is on D?
I wonder if the concern about Gmail closing is from Googleâs own message on its google.com/ig page?
On that pays it says very clearly that Google IG is being discontinued in November 2013.
I made the âmistakeâ of mentioning this in my newsletter : I expressly stated that it did NOT affect Gmail. I still received emails asking for alternative email providers for when Gmail stops.
As for IG: Iâm on the look out for an alternative because I think itâs very good and Iâll miss it.
02-Oct-2012
It has always been my understanding that Gmail is the best and most stable. Never thought of them shutting down.
Yahoo only does POP3 as far as I know, so I wonder if this IMAP solution is going to work??
04-Oct-2012
With free Yahoo email you can set up your account as IMAP even though Yahoo does not advertise it. I have done it using Thunderbird, but much prefer POP but you must use the paid Yahoo email for POP.
First thing to mention is that I am very happy with your newsletter. Thanks a lot.
In your answer to this question you tell us that it is rather complicated, but it is really very easy. Just be patient if you have a lot to transfer. I do this whenever necessary (using different Yahoo accounts). Just remember when setting up Yahoo, they use ports 993 sending and 587 for receiving.
Secondary question:
Iâve never fely happy about leaving all my e-mails on a providerâs server as I often need to refer to them.
Is there any way that those e-mails can be transferred to a folder on my computerâs hard drive?
@Tom,
Yes you can do that. Leo has an article on it here:
How can I read my email on more than one machine?