A while back I mentioned wanting to break my dependence on Outlook, to move to web-based solutions, but I did not want to lose all the stored emails I have in Outlook.
In doing some research I learned that these stored emails could be imported into my Gmail account. There seemed to be several solutions, including importing the emails into Thunderbird, then saving those imported emails in *.mbox files, and then importing those files into Gmail.
Because I had worked with mbox files when recovering my Mac mail accounts after a clean install of Leopard, this seemed easy enough to me. But, I figured: why not ask Thomas? He gave me an even easier solution, and I describe it herein.
The first step is to ensure your Gmail account is setup with IMAP enabled. (This wikipedia link tells you more about IMAP than you would ever want to know, just in case you are interested.) The chances are good that IMAP is already enabled for you in Gmail, since it is the default. But, to set it, or double-check, just do the following:
- In the upper right corner of your Gmail account, click the Settings link.
- From the menu that it gives you, choose Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
- This will bring up the screen shown below, from which you click on Enable IMAP.
Now you can open up your current Outlook account, presuming that this is the one you want to import into Gmail. If you want to import an archived account instead, as Zoli suggests, you can use Outlook to open the appropriate *.pst file, such as archive.pst, or backup.pst, or whatever it is named. For me, all I had to do was open my current account, because all of stored emails are in it. [I have backup pst files (Outlook's file format), but I keep everything of interest to me in my current account.]
- As a Precaution:
- You may want to backup your Outlook data before doing the following steps. To do so, just use the File Menu, select Import/Export, and then select Export the data to a file (pst format). A set of dialog boxes will walk you through the process. Be sure to backup all the data by selecting the main folder and then check the box that for including subfolders.
Once you are within the appropriate Outlook file, create a new Outlook account. Zoli describes how to do this. Set the Views within Outlook to show Folder View, and then it is simply a matter of copying your Outlook folders up under your Gmail account. You can grok this by examining a snapshot of my Outlook folders below:
Note that my original Outlook email account consists of all of the folders under “Personal Folders” and that my Outlook’s Gmail account is labeled “imap.gmail.com.” To copy items from the “Filed” folder in my Personal Folders to Gmail, I position the mouse on top of the Filed folder, hold down the Control key and drag the folder up under the “imap.gmail.com” folder. When I do so, Windows asks me if I want to Copy or Move the items. In my case, I selected Copy, so that my original Outlook email folders still contain the stored emails.
As soon as I do this, Outlook begins transporting the emails in my Filed folder into Gmail, assigning each of these emails a Label of Filed. For me, the whole process took under 20 minutes (for all folders of interest) … if you have thousands of stored emails, expect it to take longer. (Mine was in the hundreds, but not the thousands.)
That’s it. You’re done. Easy wasn’t it?
great post! I spent awhile yesterday playing with http://gtdinbox.com/ (awesome) I ended up “disabling” remember the milk now that I have GTDinbox (for now)
I hadn’t thought of storing my “old” emails in gmail! Not sure I am going to do it (now) but I’ll save it in my “someday” file
Hi Susan. Thanks for the feedback. If you decide to import Outlook into Gmail, at least now you have a straightforward way to do it.
I saw some press on GTDinbox, but I am not a huge fan of Firefox extensions, mainly because I like to be browser independent as much as possible. For example, right now I am using Safari. I do have some FF extensions, but only those that seem to me to be hard to do without (mostly for blogging and social media sites).
Susan – One great reason to have your historical email in Gmail is that you can quickly search it (even on a mobile phone if you use the Gmail application Google provides)! It’s a great way to find something when on the road or just have your email backed up someplace and QUICKLY searchable.
ok ok …i’ll move from “someday” (status) to “action” …..
The search feature is a good point, Thomas. i just used it to pull up some registration info for a product I am about to reinstall. Lightning fast.
@Susan … Thomas is quiet the arm twister isn’t he?
very easy and useful!
thanks for the tips
Outstanding! It works exactly as you said. Perfect, perfect instructions.
well, this kindof address moving email … but IMAP is limited to a 40 byte LABEL … for those of us who have 5Gb of email content, with hundreds of clients and multiple folders/subfolders/subfolders/etc, this doesn’t work.
google has 1/2 the model correct … SEARCH NOT SORT … really, it should be SEARCH AND SORT …
Whenever I use the “copy” option, Outlook crashes. First I thought it was a function of the hundreds of e-mails I was trying to copy at once, but it crashed even for 25 short e-mails.
On the other hand, it never crashed when I pick the “move” option. Any ideas why this might be so?
Sorry, but no idea what the problem is … perhaps someone else has an idea.
I use gmail so much more than Outlook now that it’s rare for me to even open Outlook (I barely use any Windows programs at all). In fact I still use Outlook 2003, which all of the above is based on … if you have a later version, perhaps that is the problem? Not sure, but I know the above worked well for me and I’ve gotten lots of feedback that it’s also worked well for others.
Good luck with it. Hopefully someone else has had your experience and can chime in with a solution.
Worked perfectly for me. I had been researching for over a week on how to do this, and now it’s done. Took me over two days, an hour a day, (because I had a lot of emails in outlook). Now every email I’ve ever received is stored on my gmail account, which is great for searching, if I ever need to find something, like what my membership info is for certain things, software installation details, past clients, etc. Also, my motivation for doing this now is that I’m selling my old computer, with Outlook 2003 still on it, and now I never really need to use Outlook again! Yay!
Glad you no longer need to depend on Outlook, RP. Gmail search works great for finding any old emails you may want to.