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.
The first step is to ensure your Gmail account is setup with IMAP enabled. 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, 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. (You may want to refer to the following Google Answers Page for help: http://goo.gl/t41aS ) 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 all there is to it. Pretty straightforward, eh?
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.
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.
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.
Bruce,
I did this and it works perfectly.
However. I don’t think it keeps things in sync after that initial copy. Am I right?
In Outlook, I’ve dragged a few messages from my Inbox to one of the folders (in Outlook). Let’s say it’s a folder in Outlook called “Customers”.
I copied (ctrl-dragged) that Customers folder to the Gmail earlier, and everything that was in it at that time made it to Gmail. But the new messages I’ve dragged into there in Outlook since then never make it onto Gmail. I thought this worked by “subscription” via Gmail and if I right-click on the top-level item in Outlook (like where it says imap.gmail.com in your screenshot above), and select IMAP folders -> Subscribed -> Query, I see that Customers is one of the subscribed folders.
So is there no way to make gmail see the new messages that I’ve copied within Outlook without deleting the folder from Gmail and re-pushing the whole folder back over there? What a pain. I thought IMAP fixed this?
Hi Mickey,
You are probably right that this does not set you up for syncing, only for an initial copy. For my purposes, that was fine, as I was migrating away from Outlook to Gmail, and wanted to copy all of my Outlook mail into Gmail. I’ve not had a need to sync the two, so hadn’t come across the problem you describe. It probably has something to do with the fact that Outlook Folders are different than Gmail Labels, although I suspect there’s more to it than that.
Sorry that I don’t have a solution. Perhaps someone else will chime in with a solution or confirmation that it just doesn’t work.
This seems to work to import the inbox emails from Outlook to the inbox of Gmail, but if I want to import (or is it export) the emails that are currently in my sent folder of Outlook (2003) to put them into the sent folder in Gmail, how would I do that? Do I drag/copy the same way? No one ever seems to discuss that. Thanks.
Brian, it works for all folders. I discuss above that I did it with all of my folders, using my “Filed” folder as an example.
Thanks for the quick response Bruce and I tried that by copying a couple of the emails from my sent folder in outlook to the sent folder under the gmail imap. But when I sign into my Gmail on the web and look at the list of sent emails in the sent mail box/folder in my gmail account on the gmail website it shows each of those messages as “To: me” instead of “To” the person to whom I had sent that email. If I open the emails then it shows the original information. It doesn’t make that mistake on inbox emails I synched from Outlook to Gmail, just on sent emails that I copy into the sent mail folder. Is there a way to fix that (for all the old sent emails I want to copy into Gmail from Outlook)?
That’s odd indeed, Brian. In the ones that I imported, the “TO” addressing was done properly. As I studied it more closely, I did note that there were a few duplicate emails, and I do not know if that was due to duplication in Outlook or the porting process, but it did not seem to be a big issue.
Have you tried just dragging the SENT folder, instead of a couple of selected emails from the Sent folder? I don’t know of any reason why it shouldn’t work by dragging single emails, but perhaps it needs the whole folder dragged for context.
Thanks for this Bruce. I didn’t realise this could be done. I’ve got my son onto it straight away and will only use gmail from now on.
Using gmail’s search facility will save one of my big headaches going back and forth between the two programmes.
Cheers
Gillian
Glad it worked out nicely for you Gillian.
Take care
Bruce
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All sounds great but before I attempt my move from Outlook to Gmail, I have two questions: 1) I assume that when I copy my Personal Folder all my sub ans sub-sub folders will copy correctly. Right? 2) The BIG ONE…what about my Contacts and Calender? How are they copied and will they appear correctly in Gmail????
Hi Byron,
It’s been a while since I did the import, so I can’t recall for sure if the subfolders import along with the Personal Folder, or if you have to drag them individually … either way, it’s pretty painless.
This does not import your Outlook Calendar or Contacts data. For calendar data, there is Google Calendar Sync for Outlook, http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=89955 , and there are probably other solutions for it as well. For contact data, you can probably just export the Outlook contacts to a csv file and import it into Google Contacts. Again, there are probably several ways of doing that … I would recommend a fresh Google or Bing search to find the best answers for it.
Take care
Bruce
Bruce –
Thanks for the good advice. This should put me on the right path for my conversion to Gmail.
Byron
I now use gmail and have my contacts and emails showing up there, but when I try and send an email, let’s say on Craigslist Outlook opens automatically. How do I get it to refer to my gmail account. I don’t use firefox I use Internet Explorer. Thank you!!!
Hi Becky,
I haven’t tried this myself, but this Lifehacker article appears to describe how to do what you want:
http://goo.gl/YME9
From my quick scan, it doesn’t appear to depend on which browser you use, and so I would expect it would work with Internet Explorer, but IE has been known to behave a bit differently than some of the other browsers
Good luck!
Bruce
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I’ve tried step by step the method this article described, however I encountered a problem which happens at the end of every folder transfer, outlook pops up an error and says can’t finish the copy. quote “Can’t copy the items. The copy operation could not be completed. It is possible that the destination server is unavailable or does not support subforlders.”
Then I signed into my gmail, most of the copied mails show unknown sender due to this error, but the email body and attachment were good. Any idea why this happened?
Thanks in advance.
Hi Jarrett,
That sure is strange. I did not encounter it in my copying and pasting and this is the first I’ve heard of anyone having the problem. Could be related to the vintage of Outlook you are using, I suppose. I used Outlook 2003, and suspect that Outlook 2007 works just as well because it is fundamentally the same as 2003 (same basic object model). However, I don’t know enough about Outlook 2010 to know if it has some difference that could cause this … are you by chance using Outlook 2010?
What happens when you try to copy and paste an individual email, say one of the ones that is copying without the message header? Does it copy it okay, or does it still leave the subject header out?
Also curious as to how many emails we are talking about … does each folder have tens, or hundreds, or thousands of messages? I ask because you mention that it works until it gets near the end of the folder, at which point it sounds like it’s “choking out.” Knowing this might not help solve the problem, but I was just curious about it anyway.
HI Bruce,
Thanks for the quick reply. I’m using Outlook 2003. I tried to copy an individual email as you suggested, and I think I found out the problem. The error only happens when I copy my company all employee emails, it says “Can’t copy the items. Could not complete the operation. One or more parameter values are not valid.” and the all employee emails strangely have no sent to whom appeared in outlook, I guess that’s the parameter missing. Other emails worked fine. Great article and advise. Thanks a lot!
Hi Jarrett,
That is interesting. Outlook probably uses some special “trickery” for the .ALL addresses, and that trickery appears to interfere with the copying process. Interesting.
Thanks for sharing your discovery of what caused the glitch. It’ll probably wind up helping others who have .ALL email addresses in Outlook.
Take care.
I was reading this post of yours and i’m thinking that gmail deletes the mails with labels when we deleted those from the sent items folder/answers. i’m looking for a new solution online, with pastes.
Not sure I understand your comment, R., but best wishes for an email solution that suits your needs.
i found a way:
“I did discovered an indirect way to achieve this within Outlook (IMAP configured). From there, you can drag and drop sent messages to a folder (=label). The sent folder will be cleared up. I presume this is possible using other email clients configured the same way.”
here: google support link. Haven’t tried it yet. the stuff a girl has got to do to make things that should be functional work..
If you are looking for a method to achieve this without using Outlook (say for example, you don’t own it…), I have written a guide for that.
Thanks Brendan. Always good to know alternate ways of doing something.
The step “Once you are in the appropriate Outlook file, create a new Outlook account” doesn’t describe the steps to do that. I stumbled through but am not sure my account settings are correct (what, for instance, is a user name under GMail? Is it “First Last”, or “First Last@gmail.com“? Any chance you could be more clear on the steps to set up an imap account correctly using GMail settings?
Assuming I have done that right (not a good assumption), I get to the point where I drag folders (or even mail items) to the imap.gmail.com folder. I get the error message “Can’t move the items. The connection to the server is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action”. I’m not sure what the problem is, because Outlook is very much on line. This error message is being typically cryptic; the connection to what server is unavilable (I assume GMail). My company blocks access to GMail accounts through Explorer; is it possible they have blocked access to GMail’s imap server, too?
@RyderDA … just follow the instructions at Google’s site: http://goo.gl/t41aS
I have no way of knowing whether your company blocks the gmail imap server. Certainly possible. But a lot of companies use gmail for their mail systems, and your company would be denying communication with those companies if they did such a block (at least, I would think they would be prohibiting communication from those companies).
I wrote this post almost three years ago and have used Outlook very little since then, so I may be overlooking something to tell you. But, my recollection is that this is pretty straightforward. This page is viewed hundreds of times every day, and I’ve had minimal feedback on the process being difficult. Good luck on it. I think the Google link I mentioned in the previous paragraph will help you a lot.
I have followed all the instructions – I think – and have imap files appearing in Outlook Express and also have Gmail folders transferred to OE – but I cannot seem to drag any folders about and I cannot make OE folders transfer to Gmail – which is what I need. What have I done wrong? TIA
Terry, I haven’t used Outlook Express for over 10 years, so I cannot make a good guess at what the problem is.
I am tinkering with this and moved one small Outlook folder down to my IMAP Gmail account in Outlook. I was amazed to see that folder show up on Gmail! Easy! But when I moved the folder back to my regular Outlook personal folders, the folder disapeared on Gmail. So I’m wondering… if it only stays there as long as it’s in that spot on Outlook, what if I no longer have Outlook? Is there a way to permanently copy the folder into Gmail so that even if I switch computers and lose Outlook, the emails will still be there? Or am I missing something here?
A puzzle to me, Jim. You say you Moved the folder from the Outlook main folder to the Gmail folder, instead of Copying the folder? And then you Moved it back?
I would try the Copy operation instead of the Move operation. Once you Moved it back out of the Gmail folder, you were telling Gmail to delete those files.
Once you’ve copied everything you want to from Outlook, then there is no need to use Outlook again. You can switch computers, or whatever.
Yes, the first time I simply moved it, rather than copying it. Now I have copied it there and the original is still in my Outlook personal folders. I guess it makes sense that deleting it would be telling Gmail to remove them from the web side. Thanks for the reply!
Hi there,
Once you have moved everything can you delete the gmail portion off of your Outlook? I have outlook at work and want to find a way to keep my few folders with personal e-mails… just wondering if this is the only way?
Thanks!
Jessica,
Yes … Deleting the gmail portion off Outlook just removes the gmail account from Outlook, and has no impact on the gmail content
hi,
thanks for the help in transferring emails across to gmail, i swapped email address to gmail, as well as PC over to Mac and this has worked well.
Once the files are in gmail.com, can i delete the gmail account from outlook without any effect to the folders etc in gmail?
cheers
nevermind i just read the answer above!
Easy transfer thank you again
@sebastian, I would go into the Outlook menu and remove the Gmail Account from the settings before moving the folder, just for added security. Removing the settings will completely disconnect the two.
Thanks so much! Just migrated my emails from Outlook to Gmail…went very smoothly thanks to your kind tutelage.
Regards –EJL
Thanks for this helpful article! Helped a lot!
This looks very helpful, but I need a little more help with the “create a new Outlook account” part, and the link to the Google Answers page doesn’t seem clear to me either. I’m using Outlook 2007 and already followed those instructions to set up my gmail address in Outlook years ago. I’m not clear on how to set up another one to get the “imap.gmail.com” folder like you have. Sorry, a little green with this stuff…
Hi Kevin,
I’m puzzled. You say you already have a Gmail account set up in Outlook but that you don’t know how to set up a Gmail account in Outlook? Unless Outlook for some reason does not allow you to have two Gmail accounts in Outlook, then I don’t know what the problem is. Google’s instructions for setting up a Gmail account within Outlook 2007 could not be more explicit. I do not know how to improve upon their instructions, which are thorough and well-written.
Point No.1 :- you have created gmail address in outlook with POP account.
Point No.2 :- Now you create new outlook account to using IMAP (not POP account), then you will get “imap.gmail.com” folder.Point No.3 :- then follow brucekeener instructions.
Hello there, nice post that’s still quite useful after several years. I have a problem though:
1. We are using Outlook to retrieve email via pop from Google Apps.
2. I have many folders/sub-folders in Outlook.
3. I now want to stop using Outlook, so I started dragging folders to Gmail which created the corresponding label structure.
4. The problem is now is that the email I copied from Outlook created duplicates of the email that was already in Gmail’s Inbox.
What’s the best approach here?
Good question bromero. Sure wish I knew the right way to go on that, but maybe someone else will. The problem, as I understand it (I’m not a mail guru), is that POP3 doesn’t support a folder structure, like IMAP does, and the folder structure that Outlook gives it is a fake one. When you copy to Gmail as discussed above, you overcome the problem with this difference. But, it places duplicates in the inbox.
The only way I know of to deal with this is to use the All Mail view in Outlook, which will order all mail by date, so you can see the duplicates and delete, manually, those that are not within a folder. In my case, I had been using Gmail for a long while, and the amount of stuff I imported from a POP account in Outlook was relatively small, and eliminating the duplicates was not that much of a chore. Plus, I didn’t consider it a big deal to have a few duplicates if I missed deleting some. But if you have hundreds or thousands of emails built up, doing this manually could turn into a real time suck. I know that there are tools that help identify and remove duplicates in Outlook, but I know of no such tools for Gmail.
If you do go the manual route, it might be an opportunity to get rid of a lot of mail that you no longer need. I realize that corporations like to hold on to as much archival data as possible, but sometimes it makes sense to clean stuff up. Example: I’ve been recently going through my mail and deleting the hundreds of messages that related to receipts for applications for Palm and Pocket PC devices. I will never again use such devices and holding onto serial numbers and purchase invoices for the hundreds of apps I had is just clutter. (I started moving a lot of my old emails over to Evernote, and decided I didn’t need a lot of the old stuff.)
Anyway, a longer answer than you were looking for, no doubt, and I admit that it is very helpful. I wish I knew a non-manual way to deal with getting rid of Gmail dupes.
Good luck! Let me know if you find a clever way to do it.
Bruce
Hi all,
I learned so much through the posts on this website.
I have a big problem that i really need to sort asap that is why i want to request your special help.
I use Outlook 2011 for Mac with an imap gmail account. In outlook i have hundreds folders and subfolders. When try to sync with gmail, all the folders and subfolders are created on gmail but not its contents (emails).
Your advise would be much appreciated.
Warmest Regards from Portugal,
Bruno
Hi Bruno,
Thanks for the comment and for the question.
I’ll have to defer to someone smarter than me to answer the question: I have not used Outlook 2011 on my Mac, and wouldn’t know where to recommend you start in resolving the issue.
Instead, I’ll make a couple of observations/hypotheses. (1) If any of your Outlook folders/subfolders are named the same as a Gmail folder, I am not sure the sync algorithms would know what to do. (2) This can be a slow process when a lot of emails are involved. If you have thousands of emails, it can take a really long time (perhaps even more than a day). Hence, it could be that your emails are transferring, but you just haven’t observed it yet because there are still so many empty folders (I think it transfers one folder at a time, but it does not necessarily start with your top folders).
I hope someone who has the same situation chimes in with a thorough answer, although I suspect that could take a while … hence I’d advise that you continue to search the web for solutions.
Best wishes to you,
Bruce
Hi Bruce,
Thank you so much for your quick reply.
Regarding the upload time, i left my machine working all night and nothing happened.
However i did this morning some tests:
.1 – If i copy a folder to my gmail imap account on office 2011 for mac – only the folders are upload but not its contents;
.2 -If i copy a folder to my gmail imap account on office 2007 – the folders and emails are uploaded;
.1 – If i drop or copy a message onto a folder of my imap account on office 2011 for mac (folders created previously as mentioned on point 2) – the emails are synced and upload.
So in the end of the day what i will try to do is create a backup of all my emails that i have on my iMac (olm file), convert to pst file, import the pst file onto my outlook 2007. There upload all emails onto gmail.
I will be back as soon as i have any update.
Fingers crossed!!!!
All the best,
Bruno Bono
Sounds like an ingenious game plan, Bruno, and no doubt it will work.
Also sounds like there is something wrong with the way Outlook 2011 for Mac handles IMAP mail. Strange. Glad that you can work around it though.
Bruce
Work in progress.
.1 – Outlook Mac 2011 Backup – Done (13 gigabytes!!!)
.2 – Pass the backup to the laptop through my wireless network – done
.3 – Convert the backup .olm file to .pst – done
.4 – Import .pst file to Outlook 2007 – Done (without any error or any file missed)
.5 – Upload the 13 gigabytes!!!! – In progress (is taking more or less 1 hour to upload each smaller folder) I can´t imagine when start to upload the big ones with hundreds of emails…
Nice weekend to you all.
Bruno Bono
DONE!!! 13 Gb uploaded and everything working perfectly on iMac, Windows and iPhone.
Super job, Bruno! Thank you very much for sharing this. Delighted that it works for you now!
Bruce
I recently tripped across this article while trying to figure out how to move personal emails from my work Outlook, and this worked perfectly. Thanks.