How to Import Archived Outlook Email Into GMail Using GML
You want to switch completely to Gmail, but you want all your email in one place? Gmail's robust searching functionality is a great feature, but only if you can search through all your email in one place and not just the email you have received since you switched. Follow these instructions to import your archived or saved email from Outlook into your Gmail account.
Note: This method is now no longer necessary since GMail has an IMAP interface. Here is a good guide for importing all mail from Lotus notes, Outlook, Pine, Thunderbird, and Outlook Express into Gmail.
Simplest method IMO I think I've found an even simpler way to get my old email into Gmail that does NOT entail installing all kinds of apps and servers to move mail around and jump through multiple steps. All it entails is having an IMAP capable email client. Try this method instead.
[edit] Steps
- Import your Outlook mailbox into Microsoft Outlook Express. Open Outlook, then open Outlook Express. In Outlook Express, select Tools > Import, and instruct it to import Mail from Outlook.
- Download and install Mozilla Thunderbird, an open source replacement for Outlook from the people who make Firefox. Be sure during the installation process to have Thunderbird import your mail from Outlook Express. Installing Thunderbird allows extraction of your old mail from Microsoft's proprietary (and difficult) PST file format into a more open mBox file. While Thunderbird offers the option to import mail directly from Microsoft Outlook, the data is less likely to get corrupted if you add the intermediate step of importing to Outlook Express.
- Download and install the free, open source program Google GMail Loader (GML) by Mark Lyon. (please note Google does not like it when people run scripts on their accounts - so be careful)- here is an alternative method.
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- Open GML loader.
- Select the find button under Configure Your Email File, and browse your hard drive to locate the mail file for Thunderbird. To locate your Profile folder, follow these instructions from Mozilla. Note if the Application Data file does not appear where it is supposed to, open the folder it should be located in and instruct Windows to display hidden files. It should now appear.
- Select and highlight the individual folder of mail you wish to import into GMail. Note: each mail folder appears twice - once with extension .msf and once without an extension. Select the item without an extension.
- Open your GMail account and, if possible, clean out your inbox. All the archived mail you import will come into your inbox. Once it does, you will want to select it all and archive it. It will be much simpler to do this without archiving emails you don't want archived if you clean out your email box. Alternatively, you can tag all current emails with a tag, so they can be easily located in the archives and returned to the inbox later.
- Choose the File Type in GML. There are two options for mBox files. If you try with the more strict option and GML finds 0 messages in your file, change to the Less Strict mBox option on File Type and try again.
- Choose the message type. Messages imported from your Sent Items folder can be sent to the Sent Items folder in GMail. However, they will also appear in your inbox, where you will then want to delete them. All other messages will be sent to the inbox, and from there you can select them and archive them.
- Enter your GMail address.
- Fill in the correct SMTP server name: the program defaults with a google SMTP server, but according to the software developer this default name does not work. See instructions on the Google Gmail Loader site.
- Click the Send to GMail button in GML and monitor the send process. If you have thousands of emails, it could take hours to import.
- Open your GMail account and review the progress as GML imports your messages.
- As your messages are being imported, they can be archived from the inbox (or deleted from the inbox for Sent Mail only). To archive, click the All link in Gmail to select all, then press Y to Archive. (Keyboard shortcuts must be turned on from your Settings menu). This will archive the 50 most recent messages. Repeat until all messages have been archived. If you are processing sent mail, a copy has been placed directly into your Sent Mail folder, so you can select All and then click the Delete button to delete the most recent 50.
[edit] Tips
- Instead of cleaning out all current emails before the import, set a new filter to tag all new incoming mails from the SMTP mail address.
- Break your Outlook email folders into ones with approximately 1,000 messages each. Occasionally GML Loader hangs in the middle of a folder, if it's a smaller folder it's much faster to reload it.
- If you load the same message twice, GMail only stores it once. So if you restart GML Loader with a file you have sent before because it got interrupted, GMail will only store the new mail you upload.
[edit] Warnings
- Unfortunately, this process changes the time information. The timestamp in the inbox will be the time the message was received by Google. Inside the message, the original date will be displayed. You can search for parts of dates to retrieve matching messages. "Aug 94", for instance, will show you all messages from August of 1994.
- A method that lets you keep your time stamps documented on Ben Shoemate's website. link
- If the displayed times are important, you could (1) temporarily set up a mail server with POP3 and IMAP protocols (such as Macallan Mail Solution Mail Server) on your computer, (2) drag and drop mails from archive folders into the mailbox using any mail client that supports IMAP, and (3) connect to the mailbox from GMail using the POP3 protocol to download the mails. This will retain the date stamps, although it needs you to be a bit more tech savvy and have an ISP that will allow the traffic.
- GMail Loader is not sanctioned by Google and in theory may result in the suspension of your Gmail account. However, there have been no actual reports of suspensions.
[edit] Things You'll Need
- GMail account
- Mozilla Thunderbird
- Google GMail Loader
[edit] Related wikiHows
- How to Configure Web Clips for a Gmail Account
- How to Switch from Yahoo Mail to Gmail
- How to Switch from Hotmail to Gmail
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