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Help! Gmail/Exchange Migration

Started by curiosityandthecat, March 24, 2010, 02:10:27 PM

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curiosityandthecat

Normally I'm geeky enough to figure this out by myself, but I'm turning to all of you for assistance.

About a year ago I started forwarding all my work email (from a proprietary POP3 account) to my Gmail account so I could access it via IMAP from home, work, my iPod, etc. Well, now the university has decided to move to a Microsoft Exchange server and if I can move back then I can use Outlook natively (rather than simply accessing Gmail's IMAP folders).

Remember, all my email to my work account has been forwarded for the past year, not retrieved via POP3 (the storage was small and I kept going over quota leaving the messages on the server, so forwarding fixed that). If possible, I'd like to just migrate my Gmail IMAP setup to the Exchange server so I don't have to manually forward 10,000 emails back to a POP3 email account.

Does any of this make sense?  :crazy:
-Curio

pckizer

Quote from: "curiosityandthecat"Remember, all my email to my work account has been forwarded for the past year, not retrieved via POP3 (the storage was small and I kept going over quota leaving the messages on the server, so forwarding fixed that). If possible, I'd like to just migrate my Gmail IMAP setup to the Exchange server so I don't have to manually forward 10,000 emails back to a POP3 email account.

Does any of this make sense?  :crazy:

There are several pretty easy ways to do this, but I'm a bit curious what you mean by "manually forward[ing] 10,000 emails".  Do you mean re-mailing those from within Gmail's interface?  If so, yeah, that would decidedly not be easy.

What should be about as easy as anything else is:

Configure Outlook for your new Exchange server.
Set Gmail to allow IMAP access [Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> (x) Enable IMAP]
Configure Outlook for your existing Gmail account
For each Gmail "label", make a folder on Exchange and then in the Gmail account/label "Select all" and click-drag/copy/etc to the folder in Exchange

If you're looking for a more programmatic/automatic method, there are some tools, but those will likely require a bit more setup unless you have a good development environment for it already like using:

imapsync [http://www.linux-france.org/prj/imapsync/INSTALL]

But that requires perl with a number of extra modules (which can all be done from Windows as well as my usual Unix/FreeBSD environments) that would probably seem over-kill if you don't have those already partially done or a passing familiarity.

There are other tools you can make use of temporarily if needed but involve a lot more work:

fetchmail, a Unix program that would require you do download and then re-upload
others/etc. that do similar things as one of the above

Generally I'd just say do it the easy way.