Tyler Ham’s Blog

I came up with a method for migrating the emails in my personal Gmail (user@gmail.com) email account to my Google Apps (user@thamtech.com) email account. I had a few simple requirements:

• Every email in the @gmail.com account must be migrated into the @thamtech.com account with all attachments intact.
• The read/unread status of each email must be maintained.
• The labels applied to each email must be maintained, whether they were applied by a filter or manually.
  • Certain Google-endorsed migration solutions are only able to maintain message labels that were applied automatically by a filter.
• The starred/non-starred status of each email must be maintained.
• The date on migrated emails must be the original date, NOT the date of migration.
  • Certain migrations involving Entourage have had this unfortunate result.
• The Recipient column when viewing the list of migrated Sent Mail must show the recipients of the emails, NOT my name or "me".
  • Certain migrations involving involving Entourage or Outlook have had this unfortunate result.

Also, Gmail normally replaces my name with "me" when displaying the sender/receiver of emails. I prefer that the emails display exactly the same, "me," after being migrated, rather than saying "user@gmail.com". Is this too much to ask? No!

I found a solution using imapsync and Amazon EC2 (I suppose any old computer would do, but this gave me a much higher bandwidth connection to Google's servers than I would have had otherwise). Here's a brief overview of my procedure:

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