Migrate email to Google Apps

Posted At : February 18, 2008 5:18 PM
Related Categories: Technology

I recently had to under go a process of setting up our company with google apps or otherwise known as google for domains. It is a really powerful set of email tools, however for those already using email it isn't as simple as we would wish it for moving everyone over.

Here are a couple of things to expect:

There are two types of accounts for most businesses. Free, and Premier. Premier is $50/user per year. The main benefit for most of you will be the email migration utility and scheduling conference rooms and other times within the shared calendar. We ended up paying, as we wanted to migrate email.

Migrating email is doable, but not what I expected. For those of you who use outlook, and keep no email on the server, google has no tools for you. You can dump your calendar, and contacts, but not email. Googles email migration utility connects to IMAP email servers (including gmail itself). I hear there are outside utilities to do the other email transfer, but I haven't tried them.

When moving people over from old gmail accounts there are three things to move:

Email - use the migration utility and move over via IMAP. Gmail's server is imap.gmail.com and the port is 993, use SSL encryption.
Calendar - Go to your calendars settings, click on sharing, then your calendar. You should see a private address link to ical at the bottom. click on that and save the file to your HD. Next, open the new calendar account, and import that ical file to the new calendar.
Contacts - Open your contacts view and click on export, save it as csv file, and then use that file to import similarly on your new contacts page.

I have also connected to other usual imap servers for my other users. Only thing I wasn't able to move over were the two users still using outlook and keeping email locally. I may look into another utility for that later. There is this blog post regarding moving email over which is pretty good, though involves many steps I wasn't interested in. Namily moving data via POP to another server based account that supports IMAP, then migrating from there. If you don't have money to upgrade the google apps account, this may be an option for you.

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While it's manual, you could configure Outlook to connect to the Google Apps email account via IMAP, and then just drag and drop the users' email to the Google account. I did this with my GMail account and Eudora once GMail made IMAP available. It's imperfect, but I only occasionally need the old emails.

# Posted By Steve Judd | 2/18/08 6:54 PM

I will admit not using IMAP at all until this transfer. So your saying with outlook you can connect via IMAP to your new gmail account and move the data over that way? That would be very handy I think.

# Posted By Joshua | 2/18/08 8:14 PM

Yes, just add it as another account. The only issue I found was that the formatting of some html email got screwed up in the transfer. Attachments are also transferred along with the messages. They may even choose to just keep using Outlook with the GMail account, if that's what they're used to..

# Posted By Steve Judd | 2/19/08 5:34 AM

Good info guys. I set up an account last night and I'm pleased!

Regards,

Keith

# Posted By Keith | 5/14/08 4:47 PM

If you're looking to transfer your emails from one IMAP server to another (ie. Outlook w/ IMAP to Google Apps), I can recommend YippieMove. It's super easy to use and you don't need to lock up your computer for hours or days to drag-and-drop the emails in Outlook.

# Posted By Viktor | 10/6/08 3:15 PM

You can just do a trial upgrade to Google Apps Premier, use the email migration service that provides (which works for migrating from "regular" GMail -- I just did it), and then downgrade back to a Standard account.