Recently I have set up Google Apps for my company, and decided the Gmail account is no longer required. However I do have quite a fair number of emails still left in the old Gmail account. There is no easy way automatic way to transfer all messages from Gmail to Gmail. However there are methods that you can use to move the emails from Gmail to Gmail.
The Automatic Method using POP
Gmail has POP3 ability and Gmail can pull messages from your POP3 mail server into its inbox. So using this ability you can actually pull the Gmail messages using the POP3. However this method only pulls in the inbox message but not the outgoing sent emails. For that you still need to manually forward the messages to from one Gmail account to another.
How to set up Gmail to Gmail transfer
1. Go to your settings
2. Click the “Accounts” tab
3. In the section of “Get mail from other accounts” click the “add a mail account you own” and fill in the details from the pop up.
No need to set up the sent as your other account unless you want to. If your messages is quite a large number, you will have to wait for a long while for the process to complete. Gmail will POP and pull 200 messages at a timed interval so as to avoid flooding their system. So some patience is needed. For good idea about what emails have been transferred over to your other Gmail account be it an ordinary Gmail or Google Apps, make sure you uncheck the “Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server” so that whatever messages that got left behind are the ones you have to manually forward over to your other Gmail account.
As was mentioned, this method has the disadvantage of not transferring sent messages over to your other Gmail account.
Manual Method Using IMAP
The advantage of using IMAP to transfer Gmail messages to another Gmail account is that you can actually place the email according to the label and of course sent messages are also transferred. The biggest disadvantage here is that is done wholly manual. If you got thousands of email messages, this is going to take a long tedious process.
The method uses Microsoft Outlook or Windows Mail. The better software to use would be Microsoft Outlook as it is very easy to drag and drop the messages from one folder to another.
Set up the IMAP account for each of the Gmail account that you want to transfer (refer to Gmail help on how to set up IMAP account in Microsoft Outlook). Then after highlight the messages drag and drop to your other account. In order to avoid program hang, highlight messages perhaps 20 or messages at a time. If your messages have heavy file attachment do watch out for this as it will take a long time to move it.
Combination of both methods
Perhaps a good way to transfer your messages from one Gmail account to another is to use the former POP method for pulling inbox messages to your other Gmail account and using the latter IMAP method for the outgoing sent messages.
Anyway, hopefully you managed to move your precious email messages from one Gmail account to another Gmail account.
Good luck!
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