Saturday, August 8, 2009

Use thunderbird to Transfer gmail email

I recently made the decision to switch from one gmail account to another. The former was created in college and was more for fun than future use. The second one I created is more appropriately named and professionally sounding. Anyhow, I wanted to transfer all email from one gmail account to the next. There was not a clearly defined way to do this, so I had to hunt around the interwebs to find a solution for myself. Here are the steps I took:
  1. Enable IMAP in both your old and new gmail email accounts.
  2. Download Thunderbird.
  3. Add your old gmail email account to Thunderbird with IMAP protocol options.
  4. Add your new gmail email account to Thunderbird.
  5. In your old gmail email account, expand the [Gmail] folder to view the IMAP folders for your gmail account.
  6. Select the email messages you want to copy to your new gmail account.
  7. Right Click >> Copy To >> new gmail account >> [Gmail] >> whatever location you want the email to be copied to (Inbox, Sent, All Mail)
Let Thunderbird work it's magic. Depending on how many messages you are copying and their size, it can take a while. Thunderbird will download the entire message locally and then copy it to the destination. Hope this helps! -Dave

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