just an asterisk

Q:

Bill wrote:

I need to get some old emails from [my previous email provider] to be able to transfer them to Google so I can forward them to people. I can read and likely print the defunct notes, but can I transfer them to my Google email accounts?

A:

Thanks for the question Bill.  The good news is that I have an answer… the bad is that it’s not super easy and there isn’t a quick tool to help.  However, you can do it and I’m going to show you how.  There are three main steps:

Step 1 – Enable your email to allow IMAP connections.

IMAP is simply a way for your email program (like outlook) to communicate with your Gmail account (passing information like what folder a message is in and if it’s read or unread).  The procedure is pretty straight forward.

To enable IMAP in Gmail:

1. Sign in to Gmail.
2. Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
3. Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
4. Select Enable IMAP.
5. Save your changes.

See that wasn’t so hard!  Now for the next step.

Step 2 – Setup Gmail in your Microsoft Outlook

It may seem strange that we’re setting up Gmail in Outlook (when you wanted to setup your Outlook in Gmail).  However, this is the best way to transfer emails – we just need to get the two services speaking the same language.

To setup Gmail in your Outlook, click on the following links:

• Outlook 2003
• Outlook 2007

It’s not that many steps – really the crux of the problem is the screen below (in Outlook 2003).  Be sure to follow the instructions carefully and you shouldn’t have any issues.

Step 3 – Drag and drop

Finally we come to the fun part.  Once your email from Gmail has downloaded from the servers into Outlook, you really have a combined portal for both your email accounts.  You can drag emails from one to the other!  I setup an example below – I dragged an email from my outlook drafts to my Gmail account.

And here is the result:

Conclusion:

This is the down and dirty way to move email.  If you need more control over the result, consider using the folders in Gmail.  There are several other tutorials out on Google.  In my case, when I first tried this, I simply needed to get the data onto my Gmail account.  I didn’t really care how.

I hope that this has been a helpful little tutorial.  Feel free to call out any problems in the comments!

~ab

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 8:48 am and is filed under Q&A. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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