[Warning, this is a techy post]

Finally.

Got it.

2GB of email transferred from my personal gmail account of 3 years to my domain email at google hosted...

• All dates correct
• All lookitsme@gmail.com changed to my real email address, so now my emails show that everything (for the last 3 years) was sent to or from my domain email, rather than a gmail account
• All labels stuck

The process:

• Install ubuntu as a virtual machine. Just go with vmware, it's so much faster, and you can download a pre-built ubuntu already installed. Don't mess with microsoft virtual pc like I did.
• Use the Synaptic package manager and get imapsync and it's dependencies.
  
• Run imapsync with a command like the following (thanks to this blog post). You may need to escape out the @ symbols . I also had imapsync delete the emails when I was done so when I had to restart it, it would immediately look at new emails rather than going over what it already did:
  imapsync --host1 imap.gmail.com \
  --port1 993 --user1 user@gmail.com \
  --passfile1 ./passfile1 --ssl1 \
  --host2 imap.gmail.com \
  --port2 993 --user2 user@domain.com \
  --passfile2 ./passfile2 --ssl2 \
  --syncinternaldates --split1 100 --split2 100 \
  --authmech1 LOGIN --authmech2 LOGIN \
  --regexmess 's/Delivered-To: user@gmail.com/Delivered-To: user@domain.com/g' \
  --regexmess 's///g' \
  --regexmess 's/Subject:(\s*)\n/Subject: (no--subject)$1\n/g' \
  --regexmess 's/Subject: ([Rr][Ee]):(\s*)\n/Subject: $1: (no--subject)$2\n/g'
• After that did all it could, I set my new google hosted email to download fromthe old account via pop3, to catch a few (well, a few hundred) missed messages that imapsync didn't get.

I had to restart the process several times over several days. imap sometimes just decides to take a break. There also seemed to be emails that made it choke. I ended up adding to the imapsync command to do specific folders at a time so I could keep a better eye on the progress.

So there you have it, or you can run the Amazon EC2 if you know how to do that (I don't).. or you can pay me to do it :)

Now to import my contacts...

1 Comment

1. Jen on 6/29/08, 1:50 AM

   I've tried to read your techy posts, but am afraid they don't make much sense to me. I'm glad you're sharing your computer knowledge with the world. Those of us who are somewhat inept are grateful. :)