Merging Gmail & Google Apps Mail Accounts

I’ve had a Gmail
account since the day they were first offered, back in April 2004.
Then at the end of 2006, I opened up a new Google-hosted
mail account under my own domain name using
Google Apps, which I
highly recommend. It provided me with all the great archiving and spam filtering
that made me move to Gmail, plus it solved the
Gmail Custom From issue that
I’ve written about before.

The only downside is that all my mail from 2004 through
2006 is in my old Gmail account, which is a pain if I
need to look up some old software registration number
(bringing up my repaired desktop today, I’ve been having to do a lot of this).
First I’ll usually check my existing mail account,
then I’ll go over and check my "old" mail in Gmail. Wouldn’t it be nice
if I could move all the email from the old account to the new one?

Well, you can. It’s not even new, but it’s been on my mind since Matt Cutts
reminded me of the option with his
11 Power Tips
For Gmail blog post earlier this year. I explored a few more posts offering
advice, and Google Operating System probably has the

best write-up I found. So how did it go for me?

Slow would be the best description. But I’ve got a lot of mail. My old Gmail
account has 3GB of mail, or 90,542 messages. On Saturday afternoon my time, I
configured it to allow downloading all mail via POP, even mail that’s already
been downloaded. And away it went, slowly pulling across 200 messages every two
minutes.

Hmm. Whipping out the old calculator, that means about 450 "fetches" of 200
messages each to get all my mail. Two minutes per fetch, that’s 900 minutes or
15 hours. A long time, but it should be done by now, right?

Nope. Sometime last night, despite Google talking to Google, there was a
timeout error. I had to restart the process today. How’s it stand?

To figure it out, first I’d go to my All Mail option in my new account, then
click Oldest and click my way back on the Newer link until I saw the gap between
old mail that came in (dated in 2004) and existing mail (which began at the end
of 2006). To go faster, I’d just change the number after P in the URL to jump
ahead, say from P511 to P475.

After a full day, I’ve gotten to June 2004. Two months. That’s it. That
leaves me with 16 months or so to go. I sure hope it speeds up.

I also discovered a number of issues. First, despite the mail coming in under
the old date and being immediately archived, my mail program thinks some of it
is new and wants to download it. For example, if I try to POP download now,
there are 305 messages that Outlook would pull across, if I let it — and all of
these from April, May and June 2004.

This is a pain. To stop it, I have to go into Settings, then to Forwarding &
POP/IMAP, then change to Enable POP for mail that arrives from now on. If I do
that, voila! Those 305 messages are treated as old by Outlook, and it doesn’t
try to download them. Unfortunately, more messages keep coming in. So it’s rinse
and repeat — you have to keep going back and enabling that "arrives from now
on" setting, since it will magically reset itself back to enable download of all
mail since whatever is the oldest date it has fetched (at the moment, after just
doing this, it has set itself to May 15, 2004).

The other problem is that any real "new" email you want won’t get pulled into
your Outlook client, if you do this. Fortunately, the weekend has been quiet.
I’ve mainly been getting messages about people subscribing to
my Twitter feed. As a sidenote,
there’s been such a rise in activity that I feel real pressure to be a more
interesting Twitterer. I’ll try! Plus, with Jason Calacanis

going all out to be a top Twitterer as rated by
Twitterholic, I’m thinking hey — only
700 more people and I could crack the top 100. So tell a friend, at least if you
want a search person up there. But sorry, I have no Macbook Air to give away.

I digress. So new mail has been slow, but at least I can see the "real" new
mail showing up when I log into my account using the web interface. To be clear,
if I do a POP download, some of the "old" mail shows up as "new" despite being
dated from back in 2004 plus any real new mail shows up as well. But in the web
interface, only that new mail is showing up in my Inbox, probably because the
imported mail is set to automatically be archived.

So my workaround? It looks like I’m going to be using the web interface a lot
over the next few days, until this import process completes.

Here’s another tip. A faster way to see how far things are along is to go to
your old account, the one you’re importing from. Go to Forwarding & POP/IMAP,
then look at the POP download section. The status line above the options should
say that POP is enabled for all mail that has arrived from a particular date –
and that date will get newer as the export process to your old account
continues.

Postscript: One last observation. It’s amazing to watch how much Gmail’s spam filters have improved over the years. Hundreds of imported emails that previously came to my old Gmail account as not spam are not being nabbed by the spam filter as the import process reexamines each email. For the record, my current account had about 51,000 messages before the process began. When it’s over, I’ll be able to tell how much of that imported email turned out to be spam.