Easily import Mail messages to Gmail via IMAP

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Fri, Dec 21 2007 at 7:30AM PST • Contributed by: Taran137

I've been looking for a way to migrate my old email over to Gmail for a while now. The two options to date have been:

Redirecting Mail
Mark Lyon's GMail Loader

The problem is that you lose some of the sender/date data with these methods. There is now a simple solution using Gmail's IMAP support. Using Mail under 10.5, I set up a new account to mirror Gmail using these intructions. With IMAP configured, old mail can be simply dragged to the Gmail Inbox or Sent Mail in order to import. I not only synced my recent mail, but imported old archived mailboxes back into mail for syncing.

Now I can use one account to keep all my email accessible both locally and remotely.

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even mail from other accounts?
Authored by: sdrubbins on Fri, Dec 21 2007 at 12:37PM PST

So let me get this straight before I go messing with my mailboxes. Can I:

1) use Mail with 2 POP3 accounts, say earthlink and gmail;

2) switch the gmail over to IMAP seamlessly

3) drag old, locally saved POP3 gmail messages, which had been deleted from the gmail web server, to the IMAP gmail inbox, thereby causing them to import BACK into gmail with the correct date/sender info?

4) drag old, locally saved POP3 earthlink messsages into the IMAP gmail inbox, and thereby import the earthlink messages into gmail, with the correct date/sender info?

Thanks for any help

Easily import Mail messages to Gmail via IMAP
Authored by: ghay on Fri, Dec 21 2007 at 1:24PM PST

That would be fine, except I seem to be the only gmail user in the universe to still be stuck on the old version with no IMAP

Easily import Mail messages to Gmail via IMAP
Authored by: niqin on Fri, Dec 21 2007 at 2:45PM PST

I have been waiting for a way to upload to gmail for ever: thank you.

BTW, I found that I had not been "upgraded" to imap on gmail according to the web interface, but I tried it anyway with my email client Powermail. It worked! Check the parameters with gmail, try setting up an imap ac in your email client: it may just work...

hf,

Easily import Mail messages to Gmail via IMAP
Authored by: gxw on Fri, Dec 21 2007 at 4:48PM PST

Tried this a few weeks ago.
The technique is sound but I've had problems uploading to gmail.
Lots of time outs from gmail. Have only managed to upload a couple of folders worth of mail so far.

Easily import Mail messages to Gmail via IMAP
Authored by: MiggittyMacDaddy on Wed, May 6 2009 at 10:48AM PDT

Thanks for the write up. I have also experienced Gmail timing out after transferring a hundred or so messages, so I need to manually just select the messages again and drag them over to the Gmail IMAP folders. I just need to keep repeating that till all my messages are moved from old Yahoo POP account. Hoorary for Google for making this importing of mail possible and easy!

BTW all the attributes of the email are preserved: date sent, sender, receiver, etc.

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